Mike da Ponte

My entire life I’ve pondered the question of where I came from. I have no immediate ties to my biological family and the way I am is what I was given at birth, but with no map.This idea has driven me to create figurative work with the idea of removing the origin of a story. Revealing the human form in a manner that is minimal has much more to tell us based on emotion, and gesture. My work is very much alive.The figures I have been working on have a simple color scheme yet it lacks any revealing forms of identity. Often times we can associate with things based on the color of our skin or the way we dress. Depriving them of both of these characteristics helps the figures become more creature-like.The more you gaze into their deep black eyes you can’t help but wonder where they came from. The interactions between the black and red balloons is significant for myself, a kind of symbolic way of showing how I’ve dealt with my ever changing emotions and questions throughout time. My technical process is a bit unique. I work from outside of the bubble or solid mass and add all of the glass that is used to make the details for facial features with separate rods of color. It’s a layering process adding a small amount of colored glass at a time. When the desired amount of colored glass is reached, I then start my series of small intricate moves with the use of tools I’ve created or found to start making the heads come alive. My procedure is both additive and subtractive, adding glass to where I feel it needs to be and removing it from places it needs to be thinner or less bulky.Once I have all of the parts including heads, arms and hands complete, I can begin the hot assembly method to create the finished composition.

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