KATHRYNA CUSCHIERI

Kathryna was born in Malta and moved to England in 1976 where she obtained her BA(hons) in Fine Art and then to Ireland in 1993 where her glass studio nestles among the hills of Glendree. She is a ‘glass adventurer’ and rejects the common perception of glass as fragile and see-through.

She uses the flexible potential and properties of hot glass to explore the emotions that carry the inner world of visions, dream images and fairy tale. She envisions her work as an alchemical process that brings the ordinarily hidden into the light. A body-cast is first taken in plaster and silica of the person whose story she is working with. Several layers of glass are fused together into one flat piece to hold the story’s image. The fused piece is then re-fired in the kiln, becomes near molten and adopts the shape of the cast. The final result is a visual life-scape that runs through the glass body-cast.

In architectural commissions, early collaboration is vital. This  establishes a firm understanding  with the architect and client to  allow creative thought and all designs to evolve in harmony. The glass work and architecture can then be likened to verses of the same poem, an effortless dialogue between the luminescence of glass art, the space created by architecture and the experience of people who use it. 

Her vessels are influenced by modern day stories and her kayak journeys through the Irish landscape. Much of her work has inclusions of organic material, gold, silver, copper, aluminium leaf, bronze or steel wire and mica. Her latest pieces use photographic decal.

---