October 6, 2026·Object Love
Iridescent Bowl

Katherine Gray’s shallow glass bowl runs from lavender to teal to sapphire to near-black, and the colors move when you do. Sandblasted to a fine, sandy matte, it’s coated in microscopically thin layers of metallic oxide and vaporized quartz — a NASA process Gray borrowed to shrink a James Turrell light field down to something you can cup in two hands.
Gray knows glass. A Canadian who took her MFA at RISD, she teaches glass at Cal State San Bernardino and judges Netflix’s Blown Away, and her work is in the Corning Museum of Glass. She knows the material well enough to make it do anything. Here, the bowl is flushed and poreless and warm to the eye. The color never quite settles anywhere you can point to. Tilt it, and the blue has already moved on.

