Acrylic on Canvas, 60cm x 45cm.
An idea for the @glass_and_light_ project, this is an augmented view of the King Street roundabout in St. Helens (Merseyside), an otherwise boring and plain circle of grass.
Showing surrounding landmarks (St. Helens College, chimneys from various glassworks, a conveyor tower for Pilkington Glass and St. Thomas church) my sculpture idea has a traditional brick glass furnace, with three large glass rods being fed into the bottom of the structure, and rising through the top to form a chimney. At the top of the chimney, the rods form a cupola to hold a fragmented glass flame.
Each rod is fed from a coloured light source, one red, one green and one blue. These merge at the top, filling the flame with a bright white light as the beams converge and a full spectrum of colour where the fragmentation splits the beams.
It was originally intended to include three sculpted figures at the beginning of each rod; a rugby player (red source, representing St. Helens RFC), a Miner (blue source, representing the original industry of the town, now dormant) and a Glassblower (green source, representing @glassfutures and the ongoing effort to improve the environmental impact of glass production). The piece is ⅓ smaller than intended, making these embellishments impractical to include).
