THROUGHT THE SHATTERED GLASS BY KATHERINE GORDON SHATTERED-GLASS sculptor Rick Silas has known he wanted to be an artist — even the medium he wanted to work with — since he was just seven years old. Playing on his uncle’s acreage near Montréal, the young child climbed onto the front seat of an old abandoned truck. His plans to play “truck driver” were immediately forgotten: “The late afternoon sunbeams coming through the cracks in the broken windscreen had me completely captivated,” recalls Silas. “It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.” The recollection is still so vivid 50 years later it is little surprise to find Silas now completely immersed in the creation of spectacular shattered-glass art pieces. In a double-storey industrial workshop near the airport in Sidney, he dreams up stand-alone sculptures of swirling crystalline helixes and rippling ribbons of rainbow-coloured glass. Shattered silhouettes of birds, trees, people — any shape is possible — are carefully set into plain flat plate glass sheets which will find their way into office lobbies, outdoor parks, and private homes, used in everything from shower stalls to windows to countertops. To create his works of art, Silas uses a technique that he claims is completely unique to his imagination: “No-one else in the world is doing this the way that I do,” he says. So inventive is the technique that Silas employs, he holds a US patent for it, and the Canadian patent is pending. What’s so special about it? In creating his contoured shapes and giant flat installation sheets, Silas uses no heat whatsoever. “It’s all done with wet glue, MACtac, and a pair of pliers,” he says triumphantly. “You can bend it to any shape you want and once it has set you can carve any shape you want in it.” The glass pieces are also incredibly robust: “My sculptures can withstand a lot of punishment,” says Silas. They’ve been put to the ultimate test in that regard. When his daughter was younger, she used to ride her tricycle through his workshop with impunity. Silas’s simple system was born in the early 1990s out of sheer desperation. He had been getting by making jewellery and carving giant sculptures from recycled telephone poles when he landed his first major commission for a shattered-glass sculpture for the Sunlife Plaza Atrium in Calgary. It was a $100,000 job, every artist’s dream come true. But Silas’s vision was ambitious: to create a shattered-glass glacier about four metres high to encase a 4,000-year-old bison skeleton. The factory in Ontario he sent the design to sent it back saying it couldn’t be done. Using traditional methods, in which three panes of glass are glued together and the middle pane is shattered, the broken glass warps as it expands and the structure becomes weak. At the size Silas wanted the panes they would not only be warped, they would simply fall apart. For the full story pick up the current issue of Boulevard Magazine |