Glass art is an age-old creative form.
The art ofCarol Milne, however, is an exception.
Each of these vibrantly-colored works features a pair of human hands clutched around two knitting needles.
Surrounding them are layers of textured material that connect the palms to the craft they are making.
My series of works involving hands knitting themselves' were initially inspired by the M.C.
Escher drawing of two hands drawing each other, Milne explains to My Modern Met.
The series began as a joke, poking fun at the absurdity of knitting oneself.
But the second piece in the series evolved from a place of self-nurturing.
It was created in a year of losing several key mentors in my life.
Amazingly, Milne manages to render not only the hands with detailed realism but also the knitted material.
To produce these pieces, she casts the sculpture in glass using the lost wax casting technique.
A refractory mold is built around the wax and the wax is melted out of the mold.
The work serves as a metaphor for social structure, Milne continues.
Individual strands are weak and brittle on their own, but deceptively strong when bound together.
you’re free to crack or break single threads without the whole structure falling apart.
And even when the structure is broken, pieces remain bound together.
The connections are what bring strength and integrity to the whole and what keep it intact.
Like glass, we are simultaneously strong and fragile, she says.
Our lives depend upon balancing our needs with those of our planet.
Seattle-based Carol Milne celebrates the act of creation in her glass art.
She depicts human hands in the process of knitting, all in colorful glass.
This unconventional idea expertly conveys movement in a static medium.
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