Bandhu Scott Dunham

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All photos courtesy of and used with permission by the artist.

As a nerdy kid, I always wanted to be a mad scientist or an alchemist. By fifteen, I had an extensive chemistry lab in my parents’ basement. Since the beakers at the hobby store were never cool-looking enough, I found books at the library and taught myself the basics of lampwork glassblowing, thinking I could make better Frankenstein equipment. Later, I dropped out of Chemical Engineering at Princeton to become an artist.

Whimsy and elegance are like yin and yang throughout my work. My abstract sculptural spheres and baskets have a wabi-sabi attitude, and seem to carry scars, implying growth over time and an unspoken history. My explorations of kinetic sculpture seek to make explicit the natural forces that define the human experience while stretching the boundaries of what is possible in glass. My goblets display a childlike delight, including playful combinations of forms.

The patterns of Nature, its forces, and their effects on man-made systems fascinate me. I express my experience of the natural world by incorporating odd juxtapositions and bending forms to follow my own quirky sensibility.

I find glass the perfect medium for this kind of work:  its fluidity, malleability and paradoxical nature bring out the mysterious parts of myself that I seek to explore and express through art. I enjoy and have pursued lampworking since 1975 because of its immediacy and practicality. The beauty, transparency and fragility of glass are especially well-suited for exploring the themes that interest me.

Fanciful steam engines, marble machines and other kinetic sculptures represent a full turn of the circle, back to the colorful, elemental mysteries that captivated my childhood self. He’s still in there, and he wants you to come play, too.