Recycled glass art is rad. How do I know? Ben and I popped by the Washington Glass School to talk about it with artist Erwin Timmers. For a man who is so talented, I found him to be extremely friendly and humble. 

Of course we can never fit everything we talk about in the Closer Inspection one pager, so here are some outtakes that didn't make it in print. 

Today, area contractors and architects know that if they have some glass to discard, that Timmers is the man to call. This is quite a change from Timmers’ earlier days work with the art medium, in which he’d have to surreptitiously chase down materials -- like this street light. When a contractor was removing a broken light fixture, he called Timmers to let him know where he was. “By the time I’d get there he’d already moved on to the next site,” says Timmers. “He couldn’t hold up his schedule -- he didn’t want his boss to find out.”

Now used in Timmers’ studio, Timmers replaced the lamp’s plastic lens with one he cast from recycled tempered glass. The lamp’s body is composed of repurposed exhaust tubing that was being discarded by a muffler shop. The base? An office chair. “A lot of people compare it to ‘War of the Worlds,’” Timmers jests. 

Don’t be perplexed if these light blue loops look familiar to you. The shape for this unfinished work came from a vacuum cleaning tube. The glass came from purple vases Timmers got from Gabbert Cullet, a West Virginia company from which Timmers buys discarded glass from vases and bottles. “I think they had little deer heads on them.”

This 19 x 19-inch piece called “Regeneration” was made by Timmers in 2007. “I used a plaster bed and I pushed shapes in through a latex film so it creates this nice sloping little edges. The idea was to reference some sort of life form, some sort of community that is slowly evolving and growing.”