Episode
Joshua Hershman: Combining Casting, Coldworking and Photography in Groundbreaking Sculpture
- Published
- Jun 12, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 5121
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- http://www.talkingoutyourglass.com
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Summary
An American born artist dedicated to developing new techniques of glass working, Joshua Hershman combines optical physics with the fluidity of glass to make his contemporary sculpture. By harnessing light though hand-polished lenses, he employs unique methods of casting, coldworking, and photography in his boundary pushing work. Hershman states: "My work offers meditations on the complexities within the concept of photography and the repercussions of the camera's impact on culture. The incredibly creative and destructive nature of photography is both inspiring and alarming to me. It has helped bring our global society closer together but also driven us desperately apart. It can teach us or deceive us, show us the furthest reaches of space, or the closest representations of matter itself. It is these contrasting realities that exist within photography, which inspire my works of contemporary art." Being born with no peripheral vision or depth perception, decades of vision therapy led Hershman to his lifelong fascination with the complex nature of the visual system and the science of light and optics. By using cameras themselves as frames for his experimental photographic processes, he asks us to look more closely into the simple act of taking a photograph. His work focuses on the significance that film and photography have played on the development of contemporary global culture. More recently Hershman's work has focused on the torus — the most common shape found in galaxy formations and human cellular biology. His series, Messier Objects, was named after the French astronomer Charles Messier, who famously catalogued anomalous objects that confused his search for comets in the night sky. Originally from Colorado, Hershman was born in 1981 and first began working with gla…