Collin Walsh is a professional glass worker with a decade of experience creating lampworked glass and grotesque objects.

I always wanted to be a mad scientist, though I never did end up getting around to doing that PhD. Instead, as a lampworker and visual creative, I take inspiration from historical and everyday objects that in order to create grotesque parodies in the interest of art as education and public history. Disgust is an inherently visceral and universal human emotion, and I make use of this intensity in my work in order to confront cognitive bias and promote conversations about sensitive topics such as prejudice, social taboo, illness, and disability. Often directly inspired by the use of disgust as a visual language in historical examples of art and craft, my work is regularly takes form as an abstract reinterpretation of these objects. On that is confidently written into flameworked glass and meant to captivate an audience in order to educate them on the historical significance and ethnography of disgust.

When we find ourselves confronted by the mystery & melancholy of de Chirico’s street corner, should we embrace the unfamiliar with open arms? Or shall we remain blissfully uninformed in the relative comforts of our ignorance? Personally, I think I’ll always find the former to be the more appealing option. Through my work with glass, I hope to force confrontation with deep seated aesthetic biases, explore the visceral aesthetics of disgust, and ultimately achieve resplendence through repugnance.