sculpture

Before working with her signature fused glass threads, Zynsky experimented with blown glass, plate glass, cast glass, and mixing glass with other materials, such as barbed wire. Wanting to combine her interest in barbed wire and glass, she began to look at manipulating glass threads. This vessel and the sculpture in this exhibition titled Waterspout No. 13 are examples of Zynsky’s “spun glass” vessels, in which colorless glass threads are wrapped around blown forms. The layered glass threads on this vessel are meant to evoke a tangled mass of barbed wire. While barbed wire is dangerous, Zynsky’s interpretation of it in colorless glass makes it less menacing, and almost beautiful. Although the idea for this sculpture was developed in 1979, Zynsky had an opportunity to work with the master glassblower Richard Royal in 1994. She chose to realize the earlier sculpture again, but to make it much larger than she had originally conceived it.