"Craquelure Plate in Amber"

Laurel Porcari

"I like to play with scale in my patterns by magnifying or miniaturizing images taken from nature and science. My work always has lots of parts and I tend to start with a whole, cut it up, and reassemble it so it's completely different at the end."

Laurel Porcari's work reflects the enormous, layered canvas of her mind - geography and mapping, physicality and boundaries. Both abstract and concrete things and theories find themselves transported and translated in the fruits of her studio. And somewhere at the conjunction of art and architecture, this fusion of design and drawing is her gift.

Porcari tends to assemble really large projects from lots of smaller parts making the final project an overall composition containing many smaller ones. She layers thousands of glass strips and powdered glass to build up complex images in fused glass. Her attention to detail is total and, as with a pointillist painter, each part contributes to the whole.

Laurel Porcari was educated and employed as an architect. After a decade of making art on the side, she went back to school for an MFA and now makes architecturally scaled glass art full time. Her interest in mapping, science and weather are the results of her urban design and architecture work, extensive travel, and living in New Orleans, a city defined by water and weather.