Katherine Gray is the artist of Forest Glass, one of the Museum’s new sculptures in the recently reinstalled Contemporary Glass Gallery. Forest Glass consists of three “trees” made of everyday drinking glasses stacked on Plexiglas shelves with steel supports. The glasses are arranged on the shelves by color to form the outline of a simplified tree with green leaves and a brown trunk.
As she demonstrates in this video (shot of her Hot Glass Show appearance at the March 2300°), she is a skilled glassblower who could have made the components of Forest Glass herself. Instead she chose to use only found or “pre-existing” glasses that she bought at thrift stores (both locally and in LA, where she lives and works) and on eBay – to make us think about the destruction that is inherent in the process of creation.