The Burning Iris

2025

The sun is like a burning eye. The iris—an organ that regulates light within the eye—is a passage for both light and heat, allowing us to perceive darkness and glare, warmth and pain. In the process of glassblowing, the artist’s breath passes through molten glass, sealing the instant of radiance and respiration into a permanent material form. Through polarized light, the work reveals the hidden stresses embedded within unannealed glass.

The piece draws a parallel between the sun’s combustion and human respiration, suggesting they belong to the same cyclical rhythm: the star’s radiation and the lung’s inhalation and exhalation resonate across cosmic and bodily scales. Light travels through the fractures, exposing the coexistence of heat and cold, vitality and decay. Each glass fragment is a shard of the sun—a frozen flame suspended in transparency; it is also an iris, an organ of perception ignited by light, where the artist transforms the pulse of life and the tension of temperature into the spectrum and measure of illumination.