Bottle Slumping

I contacted my friend Bill a few weeks back, because I remembered him once mentioning he owned a kiln. I had an idea that would incorporate a slumped bottle into a mosaic, and I was hoping to experiment using his kiln.  With this phone call I sort of envisioned an afternoon in Bill's garage, drinking beer and melting wine bottles.  But what I ended up with is so much more.

My friend's kiln had originally belonged to his grandmother, she made ceramics.  When grandma passed away, several years prior, the kiln went directly into storage.  And as large heavy objects often do, the kiln had begun to "wear out its welcome" in that storage location.  Come to find out, Bill was actually hoping to locate a more permanent home for the kiln when I came calling.  Fast forward a few weeks, I now have a functioning kiln in my basement.

Long before the kiln idea, last fall, I found a window under the back steps of the MAT house on the campus of Hamline University.  It was in rough shape.  But sometimes old windows in rough shape are right up my alley.  After receiving permission from the university to take the window, I brought it home and replaced one pane of broken glass. I then slipped into full "haz-mat" attire and sanded off enormous amounts of loose paint.  Then over the top I applied a couple coats of polyurethane. 

The window then spent a year in the rafters of my garage, but has now become the backbone of my first kiln incorporated piece. I slumped a Fuki sake bottle, mounted it to the window, and created a Moonshadow sunflower mosaic with the stem extending from "inside" the bottle.  On the left you see the window as it appears without back light.  And on the right with back light as it hangs in the dining room of my house.

A second piece can also be added to today's post, a large cityscape with terrible traffic, 40 x 28 inches, I started working on this one several weeks ago and finally got around to wrapping it up.