Glass art has drawn me since childhood visit’s to LA’s Olvera St, where a torchwork glass artist made “spun glass” items.
Creating glass art, though, came much later. In 1983 when I first saw dichroic glass, with its amazing quality of transmitting and reflecting 2 different colors, I was so hooked I bought my first dichroic earrings that day; collecting a bit more over the years as my budget allowed. In the late 1990’s I finally took my first stained glass classes. A mentor in Southern California then led me into the “warm glass” field of fusing, aka kilnwork.
Dichroic glass has had metals heated and fumed onto one surface of the glass in a vacuum chamber (we thank NASA for inventing it, and an imperfect production run for its later spillover into the arts world).
As glass is technically a liquid (which is solid in our human temperature range), during a dichroic glass firing the glass and the metal expand and contract differently. Because a good deal of my work is “Tack-Fused” (in which the various layers or pieces are still defined instead of melted into one smooth-surfaced piece), it requires extra attention to bevel the sharper metal edges, often before an again after firing the piece.