I recently did a job for a Central Saint Martins student to custom make some glass for her MA project. Zuzana Gombosova has built a research device for growing objects from Bacterial Cellulose. This device could enable its user to grow and engineer properties of the material, eventually growing it into small complex objects. Her work is on show from 18-24 June at the new CSM building at 1 Granary Square, King’s Cross.

I made seven panes of glass with a smoky graduated tone for her structure. The graduation of tone was achieved with the very careful application of glass enamels by airbrush spraying. It was a frustrating process as the slightest droplet or scratch would show up on the layers of spray, so it was a matter of cleaning off and starting again (many times!) until I had eventually an absolutely perfect graduation. Then I had the seemingly simple job of matching the graduations between panels which, again, was not simple!