This practice begins with a material dialog between glass and ice. Ice is crystalline, ordered, structured, governed by precise molecular geometry. Glass is amorphous, disordered, technically a supercooled liquid, its molecules frozen mid-flow. The visual similarity conceals a structural opposition. That gap between appearance and reality is where the work lives.
Uncanny Ice is a philosophical and physical inquiry built from that relationship, sculptures that replicate the visual and structural qualities of natural ice studied directly from Finnish lake ice formations for over a decade. The study encompasses both phase transitions — ice forming and ice failing — the layered strata that accumulate over a season, each one a record of the conditions that produced it, and the textures and forms created by the forces that act upon it: wind, pressure, precipitation, cycles of freeze and thaw. Ice is a living, moving system which doesn’t simply tell the story of its history, it sings it out loud.
Hot glass has its own song. Each piece is a permanent recording of the process, built in layers into which countless variables can be inserted — colors, patterns, air bubbles, shapes, fragments, forms and figures — assembled one within another. Its creation follows a strict rhythm to which the glassmakers dance under the guidance of the Maestro.
The title references the uncanny valley: the deep unsettlement triggered not by difference but by near-perfect similarity. That disorientation is the subject of the work, not a side effect of it.
The sculptures arise from working inside the organizing principles of these systems rather than illustrating them. The decisions follow the logic of the material itself. The system generates the work.
Uncanny Connections extends this logic globally, a modular series of large-scale collaborative projects, each rooted in a specific place and culture, each investigating climate susceptibility and cultural fragility through the language of Uncanny Ice.
Ice is a system. Glass is a system. A mythology is a system. A culture under pressure is a system. All obey common laws: threshold, phase transition, accumulated pressure becoming visible change.
Built from a system based on organizing principles observed in nature, the work becomes a multidimensional recording of the ageless song of nature, counterpointed against the complexities of human civilization.