Studio update

October 8, 2025

Dear studio friends,

I hope you are well. I drafted this letter outside, which is where I wanted to spend most of my time during the past month. September in Massachusetts was full of warm, bug-less, sunny, fall foliage-filled days, with classic blue skies. In the studio, I've been dividing my time between continuing the series of Broken Boxes and moving slowly forward with cast glass tests.

After pausing the Broken Box project for several months, I returned to it in September, bringing materials and questions over from the summer work. After having spent the summer focused on building things exactly to plan it was an awkward shift at first, trying to remember the process of letting things break and letting go of plans. More photos of September's Broken Boxes are here.

Along with Broken Boxes, I've been continuing to work towards kiln casting glass here in my studio. To create a glass object, I'm using a lost wax process with plaster investment molds and my electric ceramic kiln to melt the glass. For this process, I create the intended object in wax first, then encase it in a mixture of plaster, silica, and grog. The wax is then melted out, leaving a negative space that gets filled with molten glass.

Kiln cast glass test just out of the investment mold

Today, I removed the first cast glass test from the investment molds. It wasn’t a perfect cast, and we’ll be doing more rounds of tests to refine the casting process, but it’s very exciting to finally see how the material works with the forms I’m interested in. Just these small tests have already given me so much information about how to continue with larger scale objects. Stay tuned!

Thank you for joining me.

More soon,

~Lydia