Abhilasha Natarajan is well known in the artist community in Tracy. She teaches glass classes at the Grand Theatre Center for the Arts and has been president of the Tracy Art League for many years. Unfortunately, she is moving to Boston in the next month or so, and we will definitely feel the loss of her leadership and friendship. When I came up with the idea for this photo project, Abhilasha is one of the people I met with and who encouraged me to take it on. I had intended for her to be one of my first subjects and visited her amazing garage studio for my initial discussion and some practice shots. We had a lot of plans for photos - related to her art, her music, and personally - that just never happened. Years have gone by, and now that she is leaving, she and I had to move quickly to get some shots of her working in her studio before she tears it down and packs it up. She has some MAJOR pieces of equipment in that studio. In fact, she demo'd the use of a belt sander for me with water flying everywhere. She lucked upon that equipment when someone donated it to an art group (sorry, don't remember the name), and she just happened to be there and was able to buy it for a much reduced price. Not everything is at the industrial level though. She melts wax for her molds in a regular crock pot! Do you see the face being melted down? One thing that I particularly noticed in her studio was the huge table on which she does much of her work. It has a white plastic top with a porous grid pattern. When I asked if that was standard for glass artists, she said that it wasn't but it was effective at letting glass shards fall through. It's always interesting to me when artists figure out ways to go through their process more efficiently. Abhilasha demonstrated her process for creating molds for glass, in this case decorative items in the shape of sea creatures. She coats a wax positive with a plaster silicon mix called investment and then with another layer of grog. A couple interesting techniques that she uses (which come from her mother, who is also a glass artist) include wrapping her mixing bowl in plastic as well as adding some extra investment to the bottom of the mold and flattening it with a glass plate to give it a "foot" that allows it to sit upright. More to come in a later post. Thanks for reading/looking.
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April 2022
AuthorTiffanie Heben is a photographer who has been inspired by the artists in her community |