This project began as an investigation into a material I had already been using throughout my practice: what happens when reclaimed glass is broken down completely and treated as a raw artistic material rather than as fragments of its former objects?

I collected discarded bottles, window glass, picture-frame glass and remnants from previous studio projects, then crushed the material into a fine powder. Rather than attempting to preserve the individual colours or identities of each source, I combined them. The mixture produced an unexpected charcoal-grey material whose appearance gave little indication of its varied origins.

Developing a process for forming the powdered glass became the central experiment. I created moulds based on abstracted weather data from the 2013 Calgary floods, packed the glass powder with water and froze it into solid forms. These frozen specimens were then rapidly fired in a kiln, allowing the glass particles to fuse while retaining the contours created by the mould.

The resulting slabs were cut with a wet saw into individual tiles, revealing variations in density, texture and colour within the material.

Ultimately, approximately 100 square feet of experimental tile was produced and installed as a kitchen backsplash in my mother's home.

While the final installation is functional, I consider the project primarily a material study at architectural scale. It brought together several ongoing threads within my practice—environmental data, reclaimed materials, experimentation and transformation—and required developing a process through repeated testing rather than working toward a predetermined aesthetic result.

The project shifted my relationship with reclaimed glass. Instead of seeing discarded glass simply as material to incorporate into an artwork, I began thinking about how its physical properties could themselves generate new processes, surfaces and forms.

That question continues to inform my current studio research.