Clay or Fiberglass...

I always seem to stumble upon interesting possibilities for solutions to the problems that I am facing in my current work. However, these solutions often suggest that clay may not be the perfect media for me to be working with to achieve my goals. For our graduate seminar class, we are reading Eyewitness by Jed Perl, and we are supposed to check out any artists that we are unfamiliar with. I just so happened to look up one of the sculptors and found some amazing work by Robert Taplin called "The Five Outer Planets." Unfortunately, I can't download the images from his site, but they can be viewed either by going to his site www.roberttaplin.com (if you want to check out his other work) or directly to those images http://www.roberttaplin.com/robert_taplin_five_outer_planets.html . They are quite remarkable, and I guess I never made the connection that these effects could be achieved with fiberglass and light. More important is the large scale of this work. Because of the nature of the translucent clay, it is also very prone to slumping, so the scale of the pieces that I make have to be on the small side to survive the firing. Upon further research, I found that in industry, images are sandwiched in between layers of fiberglass to create translucent wall screens. I am just imagining, it could be possible to make a "lithophane" the size of a wall...