The idea for this piece didn't start with me. My wife's father built her a wooden rocking horse when she was a child — a real one, hand-made, and we still have it. Seeing it again years later, something clicked: could I actually make that in glass? Not a reinterpretation of "rocking horse" as an idea, but that specific horse, translated into a material it was never built for.
I'd been working in glass for about a year at that point, entirely self-taught — reading, watching, working things out on my own, occasionally leaning on AI to fact-check a technique, which helped about as often as it sent me down the wrong path. Nothing about this piece sat inside the normal boundaries of fused glass work, and I was designing a lot of it blind. Nine panels, hand-cut from Bullseye Glass, each one kiln-fired once to fuse the shape, then CNC-cut to get the interlocking joints precise, then fired a second time.
Nine panels, unassembled.
The hardest part wasn't any single panel — it was working out how the pieces would actually hold each other up once assembled, with no adhesive anywhere in the structure. I didn't fully know if it would stand until it did.
That's the tension I was after in the finished piece, too. It's instantly familiar — everyone recognises the silhouette immediately — but it withholds the one thing that familiarity promises: you can't touch it, can't push it, can't let a kid near it. It asks you to pause and consider it instead, which is a strange thing to ask of a toy.
The piece also sits close to a loss our family went through around that time. I won't go into the details — it isn't mine to tell — but it was in the back of my mind throughout, and it's part of why fragility and impermanence felt like the right things to be building toward, not just a nice idea for a glass sculpture.
This is the first piece in a series I'm calling Precious Things, which I'll keep building out — using glass to look at the objects and moments that carry more emotional weight than their size would suggest. The through-line isn't the rocking horse specifically, it's the idea that the things worth protecting are usually ordinary and easy to overlook until you actually look at them.
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