The Glass Between Us: Pandemic-Era Plexiglass Reimagined as Couture Exploring Isolation, Connection, and Memory

The Glass Between Us is a series of twenty sculptural couture garments made from reclaimed pandemic-era plexiglass, designed and fabricated by artist Amelia Volwiler-Stanley at Kalamazoo Makerspace. Each piece transforms a material once used to divide communal spaces and protect public health into something luminous, bodily, and expressive. Using laser-cutting CNC technology, large plexiglass panels are digitally designed and precisely cut into hundreds of smaller components—rings, links, petals, and lattice segments—that can be reassembled into flexible textile-like structures. These pieces are later joined by hand with metal hardware and vintage jewelry elements, allowing rigid plastic to move, drape, and conform to the human form. The work fuses digital fabrication (laser-cutting) and hand assembly to reshape a rigid material into flexible forms that conform to the body. The series includes gowns made of chainmail with flower-shaped links, corsets and epaulettes recalling protective armor, and lattice-like structures that drape like scaffolds. Some garments evoke the delicacy of jewelry or netting, while others feel architectural, creating an interplay between fragility with strength. Each form tests the limits of the material’s flexibility while transforming rigidity into movement.

Scratched and scuffed from its past life, the plexiglass serves as both the structural core and the narrative vehicle of the work. Laser-etched imagery such as butterfly eyespots (a form of natural camouflage) references self-protection, transformation, and concealment. Layered holographic and mirrored acrylics create shifting optical effects that mirror the mutability of memory and identity. Though the project resists simple pandemic literalism, it remains informed by that era’s social and political conditions: public health isolation, the politicization of protection, and the psychological costs of separation. Once serving as safety barriers, the plexiglass now stands for the invisible walls that divide people across ideological lines. Like the “Iron Curtain” of the Cold War, these transparent divides signify psychological disconnection more than physical obstruction. By fragmenting those literal and symbolic barriers and linking them into wearable forms, The Glass Between Us alchemizes “waste” as ornament and armor, isolation into connection, and fragility into resilience.

Although plexiglass aerosol guards often ended up in dumpsters after the pandemic, in this project the material is not treated as debris from a past crisis but as an artifact of its time. It’s a future relic that carries the emotional history of that period. The use of reclaimed materials is both practical and conceptual, and expands beyond the plexiglass. Antique hardware, vintage costume jewelry, and old clothing act as parallel relics of other eras, though their histories diverge: one prevented bodily contact, the others adorned it. These elements bridge the industrial and the intimate, helping the plexiglass shift from a symbol of separation into a language of ornament and armor. Woven together, they create a sense of temporal ambiguity, allowing the work to exist between past and future. This interlacing of time and material integrates the memory of a collective tragedy into the broader fabric of human experience, transforming what might be forgotten into something enduring.