ODE TO MORPH
JADE GREEN
1′-8″ H, 1′-1″ W, 9″ D
COLLECTED
“Curl-over” glass sculpture
Ode to Morph, which I refer to as my “curl-over” glass sculpture, was inspired by one of my first open design wood sculptures, Morph VI.
I wanted to go larger and try a curl that penetrated the center of the piece. Doing that in wood with its natural, internal grain structure was one thing, but it would be quite something else doing it in glass.
As with Blue Shift and Splash, I’m not only using line and plane as design elements, but as structure as well. Once again, art and engineering come together for me as both aesthetics and function.
The severe curled-over and high-point elements at top provided an extremely risky move and an additional challenge for casting at the foundry. It required my doing some cold-working on the cast piece later, but I feel, together, we pulled it off nicely.
You might wonder about the “bullet holes” in the first photo below. I tried a new technique for extracting cores of wax with a drill from the solid cylinder. It proved helpful as an excavation process where I wanted huge negative space across the entire width of the piece. From solid core to finished wax, I reduced the weight from 55 to 12 lbs.
