Busy Bees
Wanda’s nature-inspired glass art depicts a story that flows from realistic representations to abstract interpretations with 3D elements that add depth and reflections. Wanda manipulates and forms glass into shapes with heat, flow, dimension, patterns and texture bringing vibrant colors to life.
Honey Bees are essential pollinators of food crop and wild plants and they produce Honey. My inspiration came from watching the bees gathering pollen, talking bees and honey production with a couple of friends who have bees and gather honey. This inspiration along with a desire to dust off my math and geometry skills while practicing precise glass cutting let to the design of the honeycomb.
Artistic Process:
For the background, I cut large hexagons and fired them together to create desired thickness as well as color and depth. I then cut many hexagons in different shades of amber. These were fired to the base large hexagon to create the honeycomb.
Cutting hexagons is the geometry and math challenge - decide size, then cut the right width in rectangle shape, determine correct angle and cut one way, flip cut another way, which gets diamond shape then make it a hexagon.
The bees are kilncasted and permanently adhered to the honeycomb.
The stand is made of multiple layers of glass with the base matching the back of the honeycomb. Ambers were swirled in to create a flowing design. I made amber glass "pebbles" and added them to the front and back of the stand to create drops of honey.
