The boats, or ships, have become my signature, and Ive worked with them most of my career. Through the boats, I discovered the possibilities of sand casting, which led me to recognize glass as my main material. The boat carries so much history and symbolism, with a thin hull being the only protection from catastrophe. A boat is its own community. In the past, kings and captains were buried in their boats with golden treasure, horses, and other valuables. The dead were sent out to the open sea, left to tumble off the edge of the horizon into a new life on the other side. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the herring began to run low, fishermen from Bohuslan, Sweden, took their boats to Mobile, Louisiana, where they found and sold kerosene which made them rich. What weve been able to do with boats is incredible. To me, a boat is also a place of solitude. If you row out with your beloved, you are alone, isolated from the world. The boat is to me what the canvas is to a painter. I never get tired of it. Boats take hold of the observer. It is history in glass, which is definitive and cannot be changed. Bertil Vallien