Artist Profile:

Nejat Kavvas

In speaking of glass, alchemy best describes that wondrous process where uninspiring, and apparently dull materials are transformed into a sparkling liquid and blown or cast into objects of glowing intensity, transparent brilliance, or kaleidoscopic chroma. From the searing heat of the furnace or kiln, emerge objects of crystalline beauty, utter fragility and ice-like hardness. Glass is born.

Nejat Kavvas is relatively new to glass sculpture and cast glass, but his love of glass and his ability to orchestrate colour have been with him all his life.

He remembers the joy of painting on glass as a child, and the depth of colouration and transparency that glass gave him.

He recalls visiting Cologne Cathedral in his early years, being overawed by the stained glass windows, but even more profoundly discovering Roman glass artefacts in the crypt, remnants of occupation long preceding the building of the grand Gothic cathedral on the same site.

As a teenager, growing up in South Eastern Turkey, or old Mesopotamia, he encountered examples of the earliest glass making known, and purchased for himself small Ionian (5thC AD) glass bottles and a 7thC BC Lydian black glass bracelet, artefacts that he retains today. These delicate, tiny objects of great fragility and sultry beauty, fascinated him then, and fascinate him now.