In 2007 I started playing about with fusing glass. I was making mainly pendants for necklaces but tired of that reasonably quickly as they were lots of people making them. I started dabbling about with recycled glass and very quickly learnt that using recycled glass was very much trial and error but managed to produce a few very cool pieces. 

Around March 2009 there were lots of bus shelters around Christchurch being smashed over the weekends and I noticed the glass sparkled and looked like diamonds and being a bit of magpie I thought what a waste that this just gets thrown away. So I collected some up and took it home to see what I could come up with to try and recycle it.

I used to carry a brush and shovel in the back of my car just in case and told my friends if they noticed a smashed bus shelter let me know as I wanted the glass. I rang the council and found out where they took the smashed glass and, sure, they were fine with me collecting it. 

I started trialing ways of using the glass. It was fairly unsuccessful, what I had visualized for the glass certainly wasn’t how it was turning out. Then there was an earthquake! My collection of shattered  glass was buried under liquefaction so I lost most of it, and my kiln was out of action too with liquefaction seeping through it.

Our home and community was lost and we scattered far and wide, my kids and I moved to Timaru and made it our home and finally I’m back into playing with my (now back working) kiln. Timaru has no bus shelters but the vision I had for that glass has never been far from my mind so I looked into sourcing recycled glass here.