Physics as Intimacy: Rewriting the Rules of Light Sculpture

Garmezy is celebrated for glass sculptures of striking technical ambition, works rooted in animal imagery and natural form, built entirely by hand at over 2,000 degrees, without moulds and with a precision that routinely stops viewers cold. His pieces are held in collections across Bangkok, Barcelona, Dubai, Paris, Tokyo, and Venice, and his creative reach extends to collaborations with Discovery+, Paramount, Marvel, and Universal Studios. What runs through all of it is a singular instinct: that glass, handled with enough skill and attention, can hold movement, tension, and life.

The Making of a Plasma Sculpture

The process is as precise as it is poetic. Each sculpture begins as a perfectly sealed glass vessel, extended by a narrow tube connecting to a manifold system. Through this apparatus, Tullman and Garmezy introduce and blend conductive gases: neon, argon, krypton, xenon, each producing distinct colours and behaviours when energised by high-voltage current. Arcs, glows, currents: the interior of the glass becomes animated, a contained atmosphere that responds, shifts, and pulses.

It is also, Tullman would argue, fundamentally alive. “Glass has a life of its own,” he has said. “Every time you work with it, it challenges you and gives you new opportunities to learn and grow.” In the context of plasma, that observation takes on a second meaning: the gas inside the sculpture behaves not as an inert material but as a collaborator with its own logic. 

Conceived and fabricated in Tullman’s Chicago studio, the glass forms are not neutral vessels; they are Garmezy’s sculptural language – familiar shapes reimagined as stages for light, chosen precisely for how they would receive and transform the plasma within them. The making requires both artists to be fully present, with Tullman’s technical mastery of glass-sculpting guiding the containment of something that resists containment by nature.

Alive Without Being Touched

What distinguishes this body of work from other light sculptures is its quality of responsiveness. Human proximity alone can alter the plasma’s behaviour, the gas shifting and reaching as if to register the presence of a nearby body. “Infusing our glass sculptures with light, movement, and energy allows them to transcend beautiful inanimate objects to something interactive and alive,” Tullman has noted. “Even without touching the glass, human proximity can elicit a response in the plasma, as if it is longing for connection.”

This is not a metaphor. It is physics experienced as intimacy, and it sits at the heart of what the collaboration is building toward.

Expanding What’s Possible

Both artists bring significant individual practices to the work. Garmezy maintains a global presence, with pieces held in collections worldwide. Tullman’s Ignite Glass Studios has established itself as one of Chicago’s foremost glass practices, rooted in craft rigour and formal experimentation. Together, they are doing something neither would describe as a sum of those parts.

The series of one-of-a-kind light sculptures they’ve produced to date feels, in their own words, “as much discovered as made.” After years of refining the intricate glass-sculpting techniques required to guide plasma through complex forms, they are still, by their own account, only beginning to understand what’s possible. That admission, from two artists of this calibre, is not modest. It’s the most honest thing they could say.