I'm an associate professor at Durham University. My Fellowship is concerned with a comparison between molten glass and magmas on earth, which frames the question: what can volcano scientists and glass artists learn from one another? This is important for scientists who aim to understand volcanic eruptions through the material behaviours of magma itself. And this is important for glass artists who aim to push the boundaries of their art by using varied glass compositions at ever-increasing scales.

Through my Fellowship, I'm working with glass artists and glass manufacturers in the USA, Iceland and Germany, to learn from large-scale craft experimentation practices and to try to harness magma as a material for use in glass art. I'm most interested in opportunities for truly bilateral knowledge exchange, which is made possible simply by the many ways in which the behaviour of flowing magma confounds our everyday expectations and intuitions.

Through this Fellowship, I can enter into Vulcan's forge, so to speak, and come back with a visceral understanding of the ways in which magma flows and volcanoes erupt.