The tripod vessel has been Brian Hirst’s main preoccupation from his earliest work, a form that he often interprets in reference to the styles and degraded iridescent surfaces of classical antique Roman glass. Hirst also uses the shadow as a continuing motif, juxtaposing three-dimensional glass objects with their shadow – a flat, glass image. Shadow votive bowl 1, a massive blown and cast tripod glass bowl with a platinum-lustred rim, is set on a forged and constructed, etched and oxidised stainless-steel stand and backdrop, shaped to suggest the bowl’s shadow but set apart from it in visually dramatised perspective. As a collector of historic and early contemporary glass, Hirst has an interest in the disposition and reception of the displayed object – theatrical conversations that inform the arrangement of real and reflected elements in his works.