Artwork description: A cold-worked, faceted glass sphere encases a mass-produced toy recast in pâte de verre, imagining today's everyday object as tomorrow's excavated relic.
Artwork description long: This piece is part of an ongoing body of work titled Future Archaeology, in which mass-produced toys are cast and recast in glass using the pâte de verre technique, then enclosed within a cold-worked, faceted glass sphere. The process mirrors an act of speculative excavation: a familiar, disposable object is transformed into something that resembles a preserved specimen or museum artefact, as if unearthed by a civilisation long after our own. The starting point is kidult culture, the growing phenomenon of adults collecting and cherishing toys once associated purely with childhood. By treating these objects with the same formal care as glass sculpture, the work asks what it means for something dismissed as trivial to become genuinely precious. The tension between control and accident is central to the process. During casting, some forms retain their original shape while others soften or distort, echoing the way real archaeological finds are never perfectly preserved. The faceted sphere, shaped through grinding and polishing, acts as both a display case and a lens, fragmenting and refracting the object inside and asking the viewer to look closely at something they might otherwise dismiss as trivial. Through this process, I am interested in the ambiguous status of contemporary consumer objects: what will be considered significant, or worth preserving, generations from now? By treating toys with the same formal care as glass sculpture, the work blurs the line between craft object and archaeological artefact, between the mass-produced and the precious.
Artwork description long: This piece is part of an ongoing body of work titled Future Archaeology, in which mass-produced toys are cast and recast in glass using the pâte de verre technique, then enclosed within a cold-worked, faceted glass sphere. The process mirrors an act of speculative excavation: a familiar, disposable object is transformed into something that resembles a preserved specimen or museum artefact, as if unearthed by a civilisation long after our own. The starting point is kidult culture, the growing phenomenon of adults collecting and cherishing toys once associated purely with childhood. By treating these objects with the same formal care as glass sculpture, the work asks what it means for something dismissed as trivial to become genuinely precious. The tension between control and accident is central to the process. During casting, some forms retain their original shape while others soften or distort, echoing the way real archaeological finds are never perfectly preserved. The faceted sphere, shaped through grinding and polishing, acts as both a display case and a lens, fragmenting and refracting the object inside and asking the viewer to look closely at something they might otherwise dismiss as trivial. Through this process, I am interested in the ambiguous status of contemporary consumer objects: what will be considered significant, or worth preserving, generations from now? By treating toys with the same formal care as glass sculpture, the work blurs the line between craft object and archaeological artefact, between the mass-produced and the precious.