Dominic Fonde

Art Brokerage: Dominic Fonde British Glass Artist: b. 1974. Dominic John Fonde was born March 26, 1974 is a British glass artist, working with blown and engraved glass. A typical example of his work is a blown glass plate engraved with an original short story. According to information on his website Fonde uses the drill engraving technique and on rare occasions the sandblasting technique. He graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 2001. He has exhibited widely around the UK and created and toured a number of events that mixed glass art with haiku poetry, children's drawings and opera. For the Ten Green Bottles Exhibition he wrote a short story based on the children's song Ten Green Bottles; "If one green bottle should accidentally fall..." In this exhibition he asked a class of primary school children to illustrate the story. The illustrations were then passed to ten glass artists, some notable figures on the British glass scene others were promising students who made the bottles as the children had drawn them. Fonde has served as a committee member for Cohesion Glass Network and for the Contemporary Glass Society where he acted as editor of the newsletter. Although originally from the UK, Fonde has lived and worked in Singapore since 2006 where he is part of the company Art Glass Solutions. Fonde's work is unusual in that the text that he decorates his glass work with tends to be very complete short stories that could easily exist without the glass, although the stories themselves always make a direct reference to a glass object. Recurrent themes in Fondé's engraved work appear to be the anthropomorphism of glass vessels to comment on the human condition. This is done through short stories describing the glass object, usually a vase or a platter or some kind, observing the people who may use it as a receptacle for flowers and discussing said people's emotional state. The tone of the stories is humorous although often with a slightly barbed or dark undertone. Since 2008 Fondé seems to be concentrating more on curating glass and mixed media exhibitions. He curated "Palimpsest" an exhibition in that took place in Singapore in November 2009 in which artists worked in pairs, generating mixed media artworks by working directly on to an existing artworks provided by one of the pair. This exhibition may be seen as an ongoing interest in collaboration and dialogue between groups and pairings of artists that began in the "Ten Green Bottles" project and continued through the "Haiku and Glass" project in 2001. His work is influenced by his observations of the everyday world, nature, music, and the physical process of glass making and the other media he uses. Listings wanted by Art Brokerage.