Glass demands immediacy. Working at temperatures above 2,000°F leaves little room for overthinking, so the process becomes a kind of live dialogue between material, colour and chance. That same immediacy informs what I'm drawn to as a collector: works that carry a decisive gesture, a tactile presence, and the feeling that they could only exist in one form.
For the past few years, Simon Johns has been experimenting with a concept called Future Fossils. His pieces appear at once as relics ravaged by time and as sculptures made for this moment. The works, which the Quebec-based artist-designer says "loosely reference the sedimentary striations in million-year-old stone," have included bookshelves, tables and seating crafted in gypsum cement and slip-cast stoneware.
In 2021, when squiggles and wiggles took over the home design landscape, glassware was no exception: Zigzagging stems and wobbly silhouettes became regular fixtures on Instagram tablescapes that wholeheartedly embraced whimsy. More recently, the trend has leaned even more surreal, even into the grotesque. Now, more and more glassware looks like it's melting, dripping, or wilting into the surface of whatever table it's perched upon.