Projects
Photo: Steve Russell Studios
"If you feel safe in the area you're working in, you're not in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel capable of being in. Go a bit out of your depth and when you don't feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you're just about in the right place to do something exciting.
David Bowie
TEDx Aberystwyth Feb 2025
In Feb 2025 I took David Bowie's advice from the quote above and went out of my comfort zone to give a TEDx talk called, Melting Glass - Not the Planet. Many thanks to the team at TEDx Aberystwyth for making this possible.
Here's an overview of the talk:
Balancing the energy-intensive nature of glassmaking with the need for climate change
mitigation, Roberta explores innovative techniques and responsible practices to reduce her environmental footprint. Through her blog, she shares insights into the intersection of art, science, and sustainability, exemplifying the potential for art to inspire positive change.
The image of molten glass is powerful: transformation, beauty, and immense energy. But in the age of climate change, it forces us to ask tough questions. How can we pursue our passions without fuelling the crisis?
In her talk, Roberta will use her experience as an artist working with glass to navigate the bigger picture of sustainability. It's about more than just footprints and offsets; it's about reimagining our relationship with energy, embracing innovation, and finding creative solutions to create a more sustainable future-one piece of glass at a time.
Many thanks to @neilwilkinglass for sharing this journey
#excitingtimes #contemporaryglass #madeinwales #tedxaberystwyth
Sea Blooms
I've been wanting to develop some new, smaller scale sculptures that can be shown in groups and this summer's garden exhibitions have inspired me to make my new Sea Blooms. These are available from both Upton Castle Gardens and Hidcote National Trust Gardens.
Bubble Coral
'Not Waving'
I was incredibly lucky to be given a bursary by Fresh Air in 2024 to explore making a larger scale outdoor sculpture for their summer exhibition. This provided a wonderful opportunity to take working with recycled and repurposed material to a new scale.
The sculpture I created, 'Bubbling Away', was inspired by a type of hard coral called bubble coral. I made the sculpture using repurposed, degraded, mirrored glass bubbles, with repurposed and recycled copper and steel. The sculpture was about 1.5 m H x 1.4 m W x 1.5 m L. It needed to be large enough for people to engage with - to see their reflections in the degraded mirrors. I felt that this best reflected our/human impact on marine ecosystems.
I wanted the sculpture to be fun for both children and adults but with an underlying message should people choose to see it. Engaging people in conversations about climate change and
conservation through art is very important to me. It provides an opportunity for dialogue between people and can fire a child’s imagination. It was really great to see how much fun people had with the sculpture at both Fresh Air and Doddington.
It really made me think about communication and how we chose to see things. Our perspective.
About the same time I found myself reading about how corals on the Great Barrier Reef and other places have been found to fluoresce ahead of bleaching events and how this may be an attempt by the corals to protect themselves and their symbiotic algae, a kind of sunscreen, in an attempt to save themselves from bleaching. We marvel at the colours and this amazing ability and in my head, I heard the poem, Not Waving but Drowning. So much in life is about connection and understanding another perspective. To this end, I have made a new sculpture called 'Not Waving' which will be part of the new sculpture exhibition at Hidcote gardens this summer. I hope you can visit.
