Despite being oddly placed within the Canadian glass community, Ione's thirty-five plus year career almost spans the entire duration of the studio glass movement in Canada and is marked by a progression from her early functional blown work to the restlessness of her later cast installations. This migration from the fast medium of hot glass to that most unspontaneous of media, cast glass, began in the late 1980s, and she found that the casting process, despite its complexity, opened a realm of emotional expressiveness not available to her in blown work.
As she gradually acquired technical fluency in the medium, she found, to her surprise, that her own unique internal source of invention was compelling enough to propel her ideas across the vast interval between conception and execution that exists with the casting process, resulting in major shows in 1993, 1998 and 2001. In 2004 she created a major body of work consisting of surmoulage constructions of found biological parts and structures called Fragments and 2 partial reconstructions: everything we know about the Tropocene which took the form of a collection of recovered fragments from an imagined epoch that stretched into a pseudo-paleontological or even geological past (future?).
Subsequently, she discovered in her work with bones that while bones themselves may be anonymous artifacts they are hardly neutral. Human bones in particular are highly charged. In her most recent body of work, Ossuary: bones as signifiers of human absence, she investigated the perplexing relationship between ‘mass public death’ (Gil Elliot, The Twentieth Century Book of the Dead) and individual death in the form of personal loss, suggesting there may be no coherent point of reconciliation between these two experiences of death.
'Ossuary' (Karsh-Masson Gallery, Ottawa)Cast glass skulls, wire cage, video loop. 2007.
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