ON THE SHAPE OF LIQUID
(and the colour blue)

This project started out simply as an attempt to create a basic reference catalogue of interesting shapes to draw inspiration from when fabricating my glass vessels. I needed a stylised collection of interesting, minimal shapes to guide my designs in the medium of glass... This initial concept got away from me somewhat...

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And so began my contemplation on the shape of liquid (and the colour blue).

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I have always considered naturally occurring forms as a pure, honest artistic aesthetic and I started to explore the qualities of liquid to achieve naturally occurring organic shapes ‐ and as glass becomes a liquid when I’m ‘working it’, it made sense to explore a liquid application.

Through experimentation with pigment ink, motion and environmental manipulation, I uncovered some interesting effects and quickly slipped into a workspace where creative art and scientific discipline converged and a paradigm of random creative expression inside a tightly controlled setting slowly started to form.

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I fabricated a custom drawing apparatus designed to exacerbate the unintentional, unforced behaviour of the liquid and I used an expressive drawing approach to achieve a randomised aesthetic.These prints present themselves on an almost unconscious level as character portraits; snapshots of random mutations that exhibit unique organic qualities ‐ each one with its own individual fingerprint. They are Rorschach‐esque mirrors created with as little human intervention possible and display a tidal patination caused by the gravitational ebb and flow within the containment of the liquids surface tension.

I used the “sublime aesthetic” of these floating organic machinations into three‐dimensional space and fabricated hand‐blown glass vessels inspired by these randomised liquid forms.