Your glass sculptures have very sinuous and elegant forms. Can you tell us a bit about how you came up with the inspiration for your glassmaking technique, and what artistic or personal influences played a role in shaping your approach to this medium?

Glass is a very temperamental material, this is one of its enduring fascinations for me, you cannot impose too much of your will upon it, rather coax it into movement and know - crucially when to stop. To this end, I wouldn’t say there is any particular inspiration for my technique as, having had no formal training in glass, my approach has developed through an ongoing, very intuitive dialogue with the glass itself. 

All of your works play on the edge between functional and sculptural. What’s your background, that led you to this approach? What’s the idea behind this kind of objects?

I studied fine art, sculpture in both the UK and Germany, so my background is rooted somehow in that world, though I have always been more materially led than conceptually driven, excited by the thing itself - in this respect I have always been drawn to those working in the blurry zone between Art and Design; London in the 80s/90s was a great time for this, with Ron Arad’s “One Off” studio and the work of people like Danny Lane, those gorgeous Etruscan chairs.

The theme of sharing at the dinner table is a very intimate and personal one: it is a time when our defenses drop and we are more likely to welcome the Other. Can you tell us about your vision regard the rituality of the table?

The table is immensely important, a meal or even just drinks being a sort of moving sculpture. Recently I have been working a lot with the goblet form, so we have had many long evenings, crammed around my tiny kitchen table trying out the latest pieces, over many bottles of wine, it’s still so exciting watching the pieces come to life, and be enjoyed!

During 5VIE Design Week 2023, as part of the "Prendete e Mangiate" collective exhibition, you presented a sculptural salt cellar, which manages to evoke a sense of lightness and movement by also exploiting the fluid and sinuous forms that shape the hard glass. How did the inspiration for this project come about?

It actually started by losing the fairly unremarkable bowl I used for my salt, prompting me to make a replacement in glass…In researching the history of the form, I was reminded of this really extraordinary salt cellar at the college I used to work at, which was an absolutely enormous silver ship complete with solid silver sails, essentially a sculpture for the table, that just happens to have a little dish for salt hidden somewhere in its depths, I like that.