This project began with a find of church bells. These bells were retrieved from my father's garage (I deduced that he had acquired them directly from the site where a local church burnt). At the time I found the bells my father was suffering from a major onset of Alzheimer's. Being witness to his verbal decline I noticed the ways in which his violin playing became the most effective way of communicating and expressing emotion. I was struck by the fragility of communication and expression; the elusive and transparent nature of spoken language highlighted the very subtle shifts that turn cohesive words into nonsense, and ultimately into an inability to express. These thoughts brought me back to the ways in which materials can be anthropomorphic; the way they can feel, remember, hear, that glass can hear and record…

The work has taken on a variety of manifestations; the first version used the church bells as the sound catalyst. This project brought me to a small village in Sweden: Transjö – where I worked with master glass blower Jan Erik Ritzman. At his suggestion we brought the Transjö village bell into the shop and rang it into the molten glass. This slight change; using a town bell, with a history and "live call" to its villagers, shifted my focus away from the purely causal to the idea of voice and expression. These changes lead me to invite musicians into the glass shop so that they could play "live" to the hot glass, so that they could communicate directly with the glass. The resulting object has barely visible striations that strive to replicate the sound materially, visually. Perhaps these markings/recordings are a three dimensional representation of sound.