Jabberwocky

Based on a hand sketch scrawled on the back of a business card of imagery induced by Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky," the piece is comprised of almost 300 angular fragments of transparent and opaque glass. It was my first experimentation with breaking the lines of the frame, and the talons and tail extending beyond those lines are meant to give him an unrestrained and asymmetrical character. It was also my first experiment with layering glass - the wisp of black cloud over the mirror moon is an effect I like.

In addition to Carroll's sinuous Jabberwocky winding through the grass and sky, the piece highlights other elements from the poem, namely the Tumtum tree, which I imagined with purple foliage, and the Jubjub bird in the distance rendered in this fantastic red Bullseye.

Unlike the poem, however, my Jabberwocky does not face death. I think of him as the element of forbidden which lives - not necessarily lurks, inside us all. Sometimes you need to embrace the darkness to find the light.