ARTEFACTS OF REMEMBRANCE
Glass as a catalyser for memory and grief
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Sand-casted glass | Hand polished
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2025
Glass Challenge Aalto University
Helsinki
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Finnish Glass Bienale | Riihimäki 2025
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For centuries, societies have sought to represent those who have passed, serving a range of purposes: historical documentation, reverence, religious beliefs, personal remembrance… These representations have taken various forms: living portraits preserved beyond death, post-mortem photography, mourning portraits, funeral masks, and even mummy portraits. Often, these depictions are created after death, presenting the deceased through the eyes of the living. This inevitably results in an image shaped by absence, decay, and loss rather than vitality. This realisation led to an essential question: How can the living anticipate how they want to be remembered?
Glass, as a material, embodies both memory and transformation. When molten, it carries the imprint of every tool and touch, preserving traces of its making in the final cooled form. Its transparency creates a sense of lightness, but more significantly, it embodies absence, it holds space for what is no longer there. Through experimental processes, a striking parallel was discovered between the textures left in glass during sand-casting and the pores and imperfections of human skin. This technique produces a negative space, a void where the original object once was, emphasising the absence rather than the presence of form. Additionally, the relief and depth captured in the glass create an immersive, multi-dimensional encounter, allowing the observer to engage with both what is seen and what is missing.
These attributes fit perfectly with this exploration of remembrance and loss. Through sand-casting, the idea was to capture the fleeting essence of an individual’s presence, the qualities that define them in life, before their eventual departure. This process transforms memory into something tangible, allowing loved ones to hold onto an artefact that reflects not the degradation of death, but the vibrancy of existence.
The selection of these defining qualities was left to the participants. Each person was invited to choose a body part or area of skin that they felt best represented a cherished aspect of themselves or something they wished to be remem- bered for. Using 3D scanning, these chosen features were captured and a negative space around them was created, and were then 3D printed. This printed form became the object pressed into the sand, creating a void into which molten glass was poured. Once cooled, each piece was meticulously refined and polished, ensuring that only the selected body part remained visible, while the surrounding space remained empty as an intentional void.
This collection is a study of absence and voids, of the spaces left behind when someone is gone. It is a way for the living to shape how they will be remembered.
In moments of loss, when presence becomes intangible, these glass artefacts serve as anchors, delicate yet enduring reminders of the qualities that once filled the void they now represent.