Matthew Szösz inflates glass with air to build ballooned sculptures

C. Matthew Szösz, an educator and artist who fuses, inflates, cuts, weaves, and arranges glass sheets, pieces, and strips to build emotive sculptures, recently unveiled Inflatables, a series of glass sculptures that encapsulate the vacillating rhythms of life. The organically shaped Inflatables sculptures are unlike the smooth, seamless appearance of most glass objects. Sitting at the juncture of design, craft and fine art, the pieces that make up the collection vary in texture, transparency, layering, and form and serve as an ode to the practice of experimenting with commonly used materials in atypical modes and methods.

Delineating the experiences that have shaped Szösz as a designer and artist, he says, “I am the child of two ideas. The first is the unreconstructed artisanship tradition in which I was raised. The second is the church of ecstatic blue-collar Rock & Roll anarchy for which I volunteered. This is the territory that excites me—lying between the sensitive and considered restraint of learned technique and the manic populist energy of the rock-throwing iconoclast, described by an urgent elliptical oscillation between the two.”

Szösz’s Inflatables consist of a total of 75 pieces. While some serve as examples of the artist's progression through the series, others serve as one-of-a-kind art pieces that can enliven a room with their presence. The elusive nature of the sculptures and the process employed to sculpt them are best described by the artist in his own words: “I work through experimentation and exploration, seeking to discover rather than to describe, and to allow the work to develop in ways that surprise both myself and the viewer. My practice is an attempt to maximise serendipity, and to allow a project to be guided by material and consequence, arriving, in the end, in an unfamiliar and unpredicted landscape. I think a successful project should not only be surprising, but also achieve an identity independent of the artist, and to least some degree, escape his control and mastery.

Szösz developed his unique glass inflating process 15 years ago. “In the craft and design field, the way that we make things has a profound effect on what we make. Blown glass and thrown pots are round, houses and furniture are rectangular. I spend a good portion of my time experimenting with process to create new ways of making, and in turn, create new families of forms,” the artist shares.

Inflatables are low-tension structures constructed at high temperatures with fused sheet glass and compressed air. The raw material for the project was derived from salvaged window glass, which was later cut into the desired geometric shape and arranged, with layers of ceramic fibre paper placed between different glass sheets to prevent their fusion with each other. This, in turn, results in the glass sheets inflating when they are filled with compressed air. Since it is difficult to control the shape of the sculpture when it is inflated, the design of each piece must be determined by Szösz before initiating this elaborate process. The size of the sculpture, however, can be varied by varying the temperature at which the glass sheets are blown.

Szösz prides himself on having conducted several material experiments successfully, of which the inflatables methodology is one of the best known. Since then, he has built several series of glass art. While the initial collections pivoted on process-driven experimentations, the more recent pieces are themed on abstract ideas and guided by a preconceived intent. A few of them include Ropework, built by winding glass fibre into sturdy ropes, Expandables, created by unfolding fused glass to create complex three-dimensional networks, and Iceberg, a glass sculpture that plays with mass and light, reflecting and refracting light beams to create a kaleidoscopic effect. “I am fascinated by the idea that the final object is not entirely of my own making—that it is the result of a partnership with the material, and that physics has the final say in shaping the work,” Szösz explains, describing the unique relationship he shares with the raw materials used to build his sculptures.