Hungarian-born artist Renata Schirm creates evocative, materially-driven works that explore the expressive potential of glass. Based in Helsinki, Finland, Schirm has spent over a decade developing a highly personal language with the medium—one that emphasizes its tactile and optical properties through processes rooted in craft, experimentation, and time.

Myriad is a new, smaller-scale work from Schirm’s ongoing Fur Series. Like the others in the series, Myriad is composed by hand-sewing thousands of delicate glass components—in this case, slender tubes—onto a flat surface. As light interacts with the dense field of elements, the surface appears to shimmer, shift, and dissolve, evoking the softness and complexity of fur while remaining entirely hard-edged and transparent.

Schirm works entirely by hand, personally handling every stage of production—from glassblowing and cold work to final assembly and even building the shipping crates. Her process is both physically intense and conceptually focused: “As in my works in general, the actual subject of this piece is really just glass itself and its material quality,” she writes.

In Myriad, the use of countless thin tubes breaks the visual mass of the piece into tiny segments, replacing traditional volume and weight with new dimensions of time, repetition, and optical density. The wall thickness is created not by casting or blowing a solid form, but by building it up, tube by tube. This method emphasizes the relationship between light and shape in a way that invites prolonged looking. Subtle variations in color arise from changes in density or from natural oxidation in the brass elements—a process Schirm embraces as a sign of the piece’s quiet aging over time.

Her practice reflects a deep commitment to the “diverse language of glass,” as she describes it—continually seeking out new techniques, many of them developed in her own studio. Schirm’s work has been exhibited widely and is held in public and private collections across Europe and beyond.