Clare Gaylard Glass 

A solid days work, opening the kiln was a pleasure. It looks like a bigger yield still on the rod and planted in a pot!

Not a piece of technology Apple would aknowledge but beautiful to me. An Oxygen Concentrator that permits me to revert to a super-fine, intensely hot flame, a high level of control and larger work. Working with a Hothead torch has given me all the satisfaction of successfully training a rough dog. There's a real fondness and sense of acheivement but it has been WORK. I got the big torch on today for the first time in 18 months without and felt omnipotent. Momentarily.

The Book of Changes (I-Ching) provides my exhibition title and has many natural connections with the mood and character of my work at the moment. I was introduced to it twenty years ago when my father came across it via Jung and my own copy is falling apart at the seams. I'm in good company, today I found some more Confucius via Ezra Pound:

'As the sun makes it new. Day by day make it new, Yet again make it new.'

Well the colours are hot compared with the bleached tones of my organics. The glass shards have a lovely random quality and my children enjoy legitimately breaking glass. Although it requires some control to break it into useable fragments without grinding it to dust. I made cane on the right, which is mixed and pulled while red-hot. The unique colour twists give detail and depth to fine work.

We get to watch the carp.

Japanese Tonbo Dama are complex, layered glass beads used

for kanzashi and kimono ornaments. Tonbo-dama is

commonly taken to mean dragonfly-ball or dragonfly-eye. Typical

examples are subtle, complex and many layered. The aesthetic is

very different to that of Western Glass and enchantingly singular.

There's an obsessional quality and passion for detail that I find

fascinating. I've read it from cover to cover already, now I just

have to get the children off to school in a most un-maternal rush

so I can get to my workbench.

All made on my Hothead torch. Yesterday. I am measuring my pleasure

against all the clouded, burnt glass and curtailed sessions I had while

in denial. The colours are much better than they look in this low-res photo

 I'm afraid I wasted rather a lot of time complaining and wishing for my dual

fuel torch when I could have been working..... its hard to unlearn,

back to that vastly under-rated torch.