NOTE: The art in this gallery is protected intellectual property. If you want free art click HERE. But you really should look at this first, it’s super good. Then support a human artists buy buying something from them!
This month’s showcase features
Nora Reed!
I recently found Nora, a talented glass artists, on Bluesky @nora.zone. I even recently got my own black and yellow bolo tie from hir (thanks to a very generous giveaway ze had!), which is utterly gorgeous and VERY gender <3 Sadly, not only does the phone on my camera suck, I also suck at taking selfies, so I don’t have a good pic yet but I happily attest to the quality, handsomeness, and delightfulness of hir work! Ze also agreed to step in as guest artist at the last minute when the person I had lined up fell through! So I’m grateful for hir talent AND kindness!
Here’s what Nora has to say:
“I’m Nora Reed and I’m a glass jewelry artist as well as a generator/bot artist.
My jewelry https://nora.jewelry/ is playful and sometimes a bit strange, with a lot of exploration of organic shapes. I make fused glass, so I take glass in sheets, crumbled glass (frit), murrine (handmade glass cane with patterns in it made by studios like Wilderness Glass https://wildernessglass.com/ and the Murrini Shop https://www.murrinishop.com for use by other glass artists) and turn it into friendly and round shapes by melting it in my kiln.
I try to work within the natural limitations of glass as a medium. Many glass artists press their glass or do a lot of cold working to reshape it; because of physical limitations it is hard for me to do much of that and so I gravitate to friendly and round shapes that reflect the natural patterns surface tension gives the materials. Adjusting to doing what the glass “wants” to do is very therapeutic for me; I am better able to accept my own limitations because of the grace I give to my materials.
As for bots, I make very simple ones that basically work like mad libs: I put some phrases in them and then have it randomly fill blank spots in them with things from predefined lists. My simplest one is “Infinite Scream”, a bot that screams every half hour. Here’s the code. https://bluebotsdonequick.com/bots/infinitescream.bsky.social It’s on mastodon too. https://bots.robots.rodeo/@scream/ I have bots that do a bunch of other stuff on my personal website too, from sandwich recipes to British town names. https://nora.zone/
The two art forms aren’t super heavily related in any way except that they both offer vessels for meaning. When my screambot makes a post on social media, it appears to be reacting to the post above or below it, creating serendipitous meaning. With jewelry, it’s clear and deliberate: people buy jewelry as gifts, to carry connections from one human to another, or they buy them because they mean something to them, offering a celebration for a milestone, an avenue of self-expression, or just a piece of a carefully styled outfit. All art is, of course, defined by its context, but some art is meant to transcend it. Mine is meant to be filled with whatever meaning people attach to it, and my favorite part of both art forms is seeing what kind of stories the bots and jewelry pieces end up being a part of!”
Click on the images to see them full size!
