I live in the essex countryside in a small town near loads of fields and trees which are great inspiration. I use a technique called ‘lampworking’ which involves directly heating rods of premium glass in a super-hot flame of propane and oxygen. Once it’s glowing and in a jam/treacle like consistency I then wind, push, prod, roll and generally play around with the hot glass. Once I’ve finished sculpturing it into shape it’s popped into a microprocessor controlled kiln where they anneal to reduce the internal stresses that toughens the bead (a lot of cheap mass produced beads don’t do this).

Most of the beads are formed onto a ‘mandrel’ – a thin steel rod coated in clay – which is removed to make the hole though the middle! A lot of my work is being free-formed without any mandrels, with hot glass directly onto not-so-hot glass. Trickier to do to stop the whole lot melting into one big lump, but sculpturally more interesting.

I also have a website which you can find out more at www.steampunkglass.com