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Sheepfold II: Let Me Enfold You in My Icy Embrace. A site-specific sculpture (40,000 glass bricks, each cut by hand, UV adhesive) commissioned by the Institute for International Research in Glass and Ceramic Arts (IIRGCA), Sunderland and the National Glass Centre (NGC) for the exhibition Kith and Kin II, 21 September - 31 December 2012

This project built on Burton’s research into the use of brick in ceramic sculpture and the relationships between sculpture, ceramics, architecture, and craft, and extended that enquiry to involve the use of glass.

By commissioning new work from artists known for work in other media, Curators Professors Peter Davies and Keith Petrie, (IIRGCA), aimed to reveal what new approaches to, or insights into the use of glass, might be achieved.

The use of glass, a substance sharing a material root with clay and with comparable architectural applications, was a logical progression for Burton’s research, presenting new technical, visual and conceptual challenges. Burton proposed a work formed from many thousands of tiny individual glass bricks. Deliberations about how this could be technically realised drew on the academic and technical expertise at National Glass Centre (NGC) and were solved during a ‘mini residency’ at NGC. Questions about how a large number of bricks could be made and fixed together were resolved by the decision to laboriously ‘snap’ each brick by hand from sheets (rather than water-jet cut them as originally conceived) and then lay the bricks flat face to flat face.

The aesthetic properties of glass were a key concern: the work was built, brick by brick, in front of large east facing windows, to spectacular effect. The potential for recycling component parts of the work into future sculptures was an important consideration. This was achieved through the use of a UV adhesive that could be safely burnt off – the bricks have been subsequently reused for a similar sculpture and will be reworked at ‘Unravelling Uppark’ in 2014.

The work was critiqued at a public event and presented at the Kith & Kin conference (Sunderland University); the Artification Conference, (Aalto University); Arts in Society (Budapest) and the Materials Library, (Bergen Kunstakademie).