​In Concert With Glass

'Spectacles' is an optical tool I designed to aid readers in navigating my experimental doctoral thesis, which explores creative ideation in glass art and design, using both academic and lyric writing. The optical tool, coupled with my writing, creates an artist’s book out of my thesis submission and facilitates the stories of creativity with glass, which I tell throughout it. This optical piece fits inside the cover of my thesis book, immediately alerting the reader that my dissertation is not a traditional one. The optical tool suggests to readers, that they can expect a performance of some sort from my words and thesis— the tool offers an array of seeing and reading options. It references and combines aspects of traditional opera glasses, Swiss Army knives, mapmaking lenses, and reading glasses to create a new ‘re-framing’ tool or perspectives tool. Each lens set has practical and conceptual uses within my thesis pages.