“Counter Narrative” was performed during a hot glass casting workshop at Urban Glass (Brooklyn). I poured molten glass with a long-handled steel crucible into a wire cradle form set into a sand mold and then altered the geometric form with gestures. I borrowed gestures from scores for improvisational dance—hold a place, circle out, draw up and inward, intensify, step back, invite, drop away.

I invented this method to bring in states of complex feeling, especially softness and tenderness—qualities not usually associated with glass. The intense heat, the surprising weight of hot glass, and the arc between plan and result invite the poetic and the uncanny, which is reflected in the final object of “Counter Narrative” which is by turns both earth and sky.