Free Project

When we started our free project, I first had to think of a material to use. I thought first about cardboard, but then I remembered that I had several glass bottles at home. Glass would be an interesting material to work with because it is very brittle and hard to form. At first I wanted to cut the bottles in some way and use the pieces of glass to make a sculpture, but then Mrs. Sudkamp suggested trying to use the kiln to melt the bottles. I thought this was an interesting idea, so I started looking at pictures of melted bottles.

I finally decided on arranging several bottles in a certain way and melting them a little so they would slump together and make one single piece. The problem with this is that I needed to hold the bottles together while they were melting, without interfering with them after they had melted, and without melting before the glass and making the bottles collapse. The only thing I could think of which would do this is a clay base that would hold the bottles in place and not melt in the high temperatures. When the piece had cooled, I intended to remove the base and have the glass bottles sit on their own.

I had expected the glass to sink down a little bit, but it turned out that the glass melted completely flattened down and started dripping over the side of the base. This meant that I couldn't remove the base like I had wanted to, but it didn't matter that much to me because the piece looked really cool as it was. The one thing that I didn't like about it was that it had cracked in several places while cooling, including right through the middle, breaking the piece in half. I tried hot glueing the glass back together, but the broken glass was too smooth and the glue couldn't get a grip on the glass, so it just came apart again. So far, I haven't put the piece back together, but I plan to fix it once I bring it home.


https://www.pinterest.com/jamesleeder/free-material-sculpture/