Young artist Luke Jacomb breaks through with an unusual photosensitive glass

Discovering and developing something new in a craft that dates back 4,000 years is no easy task.

But glass artist Luke Jacomb believes he has done exactly that. The 26-year-old New Zealand native, who moved to Seattle a year ago, creates images by using an unusual glass that is photosensitive.

While images have long been etched onto glass or imposed using emulsion, in Jacomb's work the glass itself acts as the photograph. Jacomb said that allows him to produce images with strong depth, clarity and luminosity.

Jason Mouer, the hot-shop coordinator at the Tacoma Museum of Glass, saw a demonstration of the photosensitive glass during a summer Glass Art Society conference. Mouer believes Jacomb may be the first artist to embrace the glass.

"The product they have developed is pretty revolutionary in what it is capable of," Mouer said. "It's something new. I definitely think it's a point of interest."

Jacomb has an inside track on the unusual glass: His father, John Croucher, developed its modern incarnation.

The photosensitive glass was invented near the end of WWII in New York by glass scientist Donald Stookey. The military initially believed it may have been useful for sending secret messages because the glass only reveals its images when heated — like a kind of invisible ink.

But the war ended and the glass languished until the 1990s, when Croucher experimented with recipes to make the concept compatible with the glass used by modern artists.

The glass has gold and cerium suspended in it. A range of colors from blue to ruby are produced depending on the length of time the glass is exposed to ultraviolet light. The images develop when the glass is heated to almost 1,000 degrees.

"Of course my son was looking for some kind of angle and ran with it. He's produced the first significant body of work," said Croucher, who has made and sold glass for 30 years and who taught Jacomb the craft.

Jacomb is exhibiting six pieces at the Glasshouse Studio in Pioneer Square through the end of this month. Each of the pieces depicts a leaf with different colors and backgrounds. Jacomb said he likes the notion of combining photosensitive glass with the motif of photosynthesis.

While striking, the images are simple and use single colors. Jacomb hopes to keep refining his technique to produce complex images with a range of colors.

Developing his pieces involves as much science as art. Jacomb places a leaf or design onto the glass and exposes it to ultraviolet light for 50 minutes in a darkroom he has created in his basement.

Finding the right type of lights and conditions took a long time and a lot of tinkering, he said. There was a lot of back-and-forth with his father, who helped refine the glass recipe based on Jacomb's experiments.

"I became a kind of backyard mechanic trying to figure out all this stuff," Jacomb said.

Jacomb first began experimenting with glass when he was 14. He has worked with photosensitive glass almost all that time, thanks to his dad's influence. He said he got serious about his art in the last two years and was drawn to Seattle because of its reputation as a major hub of the glass world.

He often works using more traditional techniques at the Avalon Glass Works in West Seattle, sweating in front of the furnace, gently massaging the glass into bowls, orbs and artistic objects.

But his passion remains working with photosensitive glass. He hopes soon to mount a kind of pilgrimage to visit Stookey, the aging glass inventor, in Florida. Jacomb wants to show Stookey his work, and to probe the inventor's thoughts on producing results with more colors. Jacomb is also swapping thoughts with stained-glass makers.

"I have a whole lifetime of ideas ahead of me," Jacomb said. "This is just the start."

Nick Perry: 206-515-5639 or nperry@seattletimes.com