Kathryna Cuschieri… A Moment of Joy

KATHRYNA CUSCHIERI

Kathryna was born in Malta and immigrated to England in 1976 where she obtained her BA (hons) in Fine Art. She moved to Ireland in 1993 where her glass studio nestles among the hills of Glendree. She is a ‘glass adventurer’ and rejects the common perception of glass as fragile and see-through. She uses the flexible potential and properties of hot glass to explore the emotions that carry the inner world of visions, dream images and fairy tale. She envisions her work as an alchemical process that brings the ordinarily hidden into the light. Some of her works entail creating a body-cast. This cast is first taken in plaster and silica of the person whose story she is working with. Several layers of glass are fused together into one flat piece to hold the story’s image. The fused piece is then re-fired in the kiln, becomes near molten and adopts the shape of the cast. The final result is a visual life-scape that runs through the glass body-cast. Her vessels are influenced by modern day stories and kayak journeys through the Irish landscape. Much of her work has inclusions of organic material, gold, silver, copper, aluminium leaf, bronze or steel wire and mica. Her latest pieces use photographic decal.