Moon Beads

Moon beads spread lrgr

Moon Beads
2009
the beads range from 2.7 to 10 inches tall
Blown and cold-worked glass, plate glass, powdered pigment, epoxy, water

Aaron Jack did the glass blowing and cold-working on this project. I assisted him.
Thanks to Steve Rhodes for letting me use his house for the photo shoot.

The Moon Beads were inspired by tiny ancient volcanic rocks brought back from the moon by two Apollo missions. The rocks are sometimes referred to as beads because when the lava fell back to the moon’s surface after spurting out of the volcano, some of the rocks were connected to each other and resembled a beaded necklace or bracelet.

I had already started designing the beads when a team at Brown University announced, in the summer of 2009, that they had discovered minute amounts of water in these types of moon rocks. So I decided to fill the beads with water as a tip of the hat to the team at Brown. I had difficulty getting photos for reference from NASA, so I contacted Alberto Saal, the leader of the group at Brown, and he sent me some. It turned out that Alberto grew up in the Córdoba province of Argentina, which I had spent two weeks in the previous year. I later sent him the photos of the completed work, and he gave the sculpture a thumbs up.

Later in 2009, NASA bombed the moon and a few days afterward announced that they had found “significant quantities” of water on the moon.