Mom and Baby Grizzly

Michelle Atkinson is a multidisciplinary artist with a penchant for glass. Born and raised in Alberta, she is heavily inspired by landscapes and the natural world. Her sculptures of swift foxes, bull trout, whooping cranes and grizzly bears are made from kiln-cast slabs of recycled glass otherwise destined for the landfill.

“I try to use recycled glass where possible. It’s the whole reduce, reuse, recycle idea and the environmental aspect of my work,” Atkinson says. “The animals in the work are classified as threatened or endangered … They represent what we’ve lost through the amount of construction and destruction we do to the land we settle on.”

Atkinson uses broken glass windows, tempered glass and even old gin bottles to create the ghost-like silhouettes. Much of her glass material is donated: in February last year, she put out the call for empty Bombay Sapphire gin bottles and, by June, she had enough (roughly 70) to make her slab.

She smashes the old glass into small pieces, and then places them into a ceramic mould in her kiln to melt down. Once they’ve cooled into slabs, she uses a high-pressure stream of water with garnet grit to cut the animal shapes. “Because it’s so precise, I can do something like a puzzle piece,” says Atkinson.

Striations where the pieces of glass melded together create an appearance similar to glacial ice — another detail that evokes an awareness and conversation around biodiversity, environmentalism and recycling. “I’ve always liked glass,” says Atkinson. “It almost has two personalities, which I find alluring and fascinating at the same time. It has a strength, but it’s also really fragile. It can be really smooth, but also sharp. There are so many ways it plays both sides of the fence. And just the fact that it can play with light is a big deal for me.”

$475
michelle-atkinson.ca