Nina Casson McGarva
Gloucester, England, *1990
Nina Casson McGarva was born in Gloucester, England and grew up in rural central France amid the Burgundy countryside. Growing up surrounded by a family of creatives and makers and in an environment full of nature and crafts has definitely influenced her life and her art.
Nina began learning the basic technical skills of glassblowing in 2007 at the French National Glass School in Yzeure. She then learned to use other glass techniques such as kiln casting and fusing at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts on Bornholm, and then began to combine several techniques.
The starting point of Nina's work is nature. She takes a detail of an element she finds in nature and uses it as a base of inspiration to create her own abstraction, which then comes together to form a complex sculpture. Many of her works are a mix of inspirations, mostly from the forest such as seeds, leaves, bark, petals, lichens and mushrooms.
The material is most alive when it is hot and transforming. The end result is solid and no longer moving, it is in the fragile period before decay and retains a dynamic shape and rich structures. During production, the glass is heated in an oven (kiln). Nina then takes the glass out of the oven and shapes it by hand until it no longer moves. This creates movement and organic aesthetics. When the glass turns into a solid state, the piece is finished.
