The botanical frit de verre monoprints in this collection are impressions of plants harvested in New Orleans and Stanwood, Washington. The delicate marks of the plants were captured in a thin layer of fused glass powder using a lost wax process, then manipulated by (gloved) hand while hot in the kiln. The results comprise a gestural ephemeral archive.

Frit de Verre refers to the process of making objects out of glass powder without the use of a liquid binder— pate de verre, which is a more common term, uses a binder to form the powder before it is kiln fired. To make these, I harvest the plants and press them into clay slabs while still fresh. Then I make a positive from the clay using either wax or alginate, and make a plaster-silica mold from the positive. When the plaster is cured, I sift glass powder over the mold and fire it in a kiln. I often fire the glass a second time and manipulate it while it's at top temperature to create form. I think of this process as ‘printmaking’— I can sometimes use the same plaster mold more than once, but it degrades with each firing, and the application of the powdered glass is variable, so just as every leaf of a plant is unique, each glass page is a monoprint.