I came across the word surmoulage which means casting from the live model.  This is a useful word.  I too use surmoulage, at least I cast from  life even though my models are not alive.  However, in my case, by recombining recognizable parts of recognizable objects, by purposefully ‘slicing and dicing’ these non-human but actual life forms, I am looking for particular effects, the reevaluation of the commonplace, for example.

      - from article for the 'Glass Gazette', GAAC, 2001

Then in 1998 she did it again, this time a major one-woman show and retro- spective at the Winnipeg Art Gallery which consisted of 10 fantastic and almost complete bird and insect forms wholly of her own imagining, creatures from some tragic evolutionary dustbin, perhaps.  Or harbingers from some future biotic dystopia we are unwittingly fashioning for ourselves.  Be that as it may, Ione somehow managed to invest each creature with a persona; each creature was caught mid-gesture, sometimes full of mischief, sometimes waylaid by a sadness that is strangely affecting, as if each were anxious to tell us its story.  And it is significant that for the first time Ione has decided to give these pieces each a name.

     - from biographical statement, 2000

The incorporation of organ forms also opens up new avenues in cryptozoology by allowing me to begin investigating the internal anatomy of these as-yet taxon- omically unclassified beings which have begun to suggest for me, not simply imaginary pseudo-anthropological relics or totems, but specimens in a process of speculative speciation by which I can populate the imagination, for through these dystopic and incomplete but entirely blameless creatures we might begin to make out some of the dark implications of man having usurped control of the processes of evolution itself.

     - from project proposal, 2000

An elegantly minimalistic exhibition [Unwilling Bestiary] curated by former WAG Chief Curator, Thomas Smart, it featured tall, eye-level, black pede- stals which melded seamlessly into the black tile floor.  Atop them — dramatically lit — perched works in cast glass that defied typical classifi- cation.  Part vessel, part creature, wholly imagined, these works were unlike anything I had experienced.  Cast glass vestiges of assembled parts — wings, vertebrae, skulls, feet — united by the vessel core, Ione’s work forever imprinted on my mind.

      - Helen Delacretaz, STUDIO magazine, Spring 2010