 Glass is an amazing material and the processes to manufacture glass have been with us for thousands of years. My name is Nayo Fitzpatrick. I'm an artist and a bit of a vandal. A really important part of my practice is sourcing these waste or redundant sheets of glass, filming the moment of fracture and then collecting these particles and putting them back together. That shattering, that resounding boom, that disastrous action, the adrenaline and feel so alive in that moment and I thought, how can I repeat this? How can I keep going with this? What often the first thing I'll do is smash it and why not make a spectacle that speaks about something that looks really strong that is technically hard to break. I found that a really interesting metaphor for the effect that humans are having on the environment. I wanted to be so involved with a real world problem. Here was the opportunity to speak about something, some crisis that we have found ourselves in and used beautiful objects, I believe, to draw people in. You're not entirely sure what you're going to get. Every shape, every iteration is completely different. What I'm doing is laying out the beginnings of a lace-doyly structure and what I want is the glass to be spread out but it needs to be all touching so that it can fuse and I also want this type of lacy look. Glass is phenomenal being a liquid solid so one of the most interesting aspects was that if you look at a very old window the glass will actually be thicker at the bottom than at the top because it moves very, very slowly over centuries to gather at the bottom of the window. There are so many ways of working with the glass and the temperatures and it took me many, many years to work out how the temperature, the way the glass responds so that I can maintain the integrity of these amazing particles that I collect. I also try to capture movement and fluidity and trying to get that idea of a sea creature that would be underwater and moving and I derive a great deal of satisfaction. How do you combine the ideas, the biology, the chemistry into this object? How does the science feed the art and the art possibly feed the science? I started making these coral structures and the Great Barrier Reef I think is a fantastic and very powerful symbol of what we stand to lose. We know that it's had its force bleaching, we know the potential to lose it is about 95%. The waste glass, the lack of colour, to me something that's fragile, dangerous, easy to break just speaks so much of our relationship to the environment and we are trying to look at ways how art and science can work on a solution and I think the only way we're going to sort them is through collaboration. Scientists and science have the data and the facts and they cannot use emotion, the very human emotion to speak about the results of this hairy problem that we are facing, whereas artists can.