Judy Tuwaletstiwa: Glass

Near White Sands, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, at 5:29:45 am Mountain War Time, a nuclear fireball sucked the white sand of the Jornada del Muerto desert high into a still dark sky. The melted sand returned to the earth as a rain of molten glass. 

Scientists named these glass shards Trinitite, after the site, Trinity. At the time, artist JUDY TUWALETSTIWA was 4 years old. Haunted by the specter the United States released in detonating atomic bombs in New Mexico, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Tuwaletstiwa turned to sand and fire to explore this primal creative/destructive act. 

The artist writes: “The raw material that becomes glass holds an interaction of wind, water, fire and earth, the organic creative process lived over geologic time. This transformative process continues to live in my studio through how I work with glass.”

A follow-up book to her sold-out Mapping Water (Radius Books, 2007), Judy Tuwaletstiwa: Glass weaves a story of her discoveries and explorations while working with glass over the past four years based on her work over the past 45 years in fiber, paint and writing.

Tuwaletstiwa’s use of glass on canvas and paper is at once refined and surprising—a truly revolutionary response to a well-known medium. The highly personal combination of text and images in this book bridges fine art and craft, technology and nature, the political and the aesthetic, the conceptual and the material.

Each copy of the book is unique: the cover has a hand-tipped on original piece of glass by the artist.