Kiln-formed cameo glass
Photographs, made permanent in glass.
Craig Merriman turns photographs into relief and fires them into glass. No engraving: the image forms in the kiln, set by the depth of the glass, and chosen from a library of glass he measured himself.
Craig Merriman, Riitta Ikonen, and Karoline Hjorth
Eyes as Big as Plates # Bob II, 2017
Selected for New Glass Review 39, Corning Museum of Glass.
Corning Museum of Glass
Selected for New Glass Review 39, one of 100 images chosen from 2,357 submitted by 893 artists in 43 countries.
Lithovitrum
A two-firing method for photographic glass that he developed and named.
Scholarship
Profiled in a 2019 MA thesis on the history of the cameo glass technique, Anadolu University.
Selected work
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About this work
Cameo glass has been made since Roman times by carving: layers of coloured glass cut back by hand until an image appears. This work reaches a cameo image another way. A photograph is translated into a relief, the relief becomes a mold, and glass fired in that mold holds the picture in its thickness: thin glass reads light, thick glass reads dark.
The subjects are people and places: portraits from the glass world, figures from the artist's own film photographs, collaborations with the photographers Riitta Ikonen and Karoline Hjorth, and surfaces taken from walls, sand and satellite terrain data.