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Hooray!

Well it depends…

The glass furnace is filled with clear glass, which we use as a base to add colours to (either directly on to the end of the pipe, or rolled on to the outside of the piece).  If the piece is clear glass only, we can reuse the broken glass by remelting it in the furnace.

This is a nice convenient way to get rid of all the scraps and off-cuts of clear, but the problem is… colour is important to my work.  That means that there is always waste that I produce during the process of making a coloured glass object.  The majority of my waste is excess glass on the blowpipe, which is unavoidable.  The  waste that I do control is the glass I trim from the lip of the piece, which smooths out the lip to make it even and level.  What gets trimmed off falls to the floor and looks like little glass mustaches (see photo).

The worst and most tragic kind of waste is when a piece just doesn’t work out.  Perhaps the glass got too hot, and blew out thin on the bottom so there is no way you could ever grind it flat.  Perhaps it was too cold, and fell off the pontil and onto the floor where it smashed into a billion pieces.  Perhaps it was all going well, and when you went to knock it off the pontil you broke a hole right through the bottom.  Perhaps everything was going perfectly fine until you got distracted and got your glass stuck on the side of the glory hole.  Perhaps the planets aligned and you were able to miraculously wrestle your piece from molten goo to finished product… and when you were trying to put a nice flat base on it you ground a hole right through the bottom.  And perhaps, you manage to make a piece you are proud of and so you ship it off to the gallery, only to find out that it got broken in transit and you now have to deal with insurance.

Well this is my life… and there are a thousand more forces that work against us glassblowers every day, conspiring to break our spirit and ruin our pieces.  And product WASTE.  Because not only do melty, broken, cracked, chipped, messed up pieces get thrown in the dumpster… the most tragic of all is the amount of time that gets wasted when you put so much effort and so much heart into a piece, only to have it wind up in the trash.  That’s time and money you will never get back.

So when you see a handblown glass object sparkling in the sunlight, beautiful and shiny in all of its glassy glory, what you don’t see is all the fallen glass soldiers that came before it… cracked, broken, wasted glass that gave its life so the glassblower could make something that worked out perfectly this time.

That’s why us glassblowers do it, you know.  It’s not the glory (ha), the fame (ha ha) or the money (ha ha ha)… it’s the burning desire to show that molten goo who’s boss and in the face of all adversity actually make something!

As I mentioned in my last post, I designed a new armature for my bubbles to be mounted on.  I drew a scale drawing of what I wanted and took it up to Owen Sound to Kreuger Custom Steel.  Basically it is 7 foot long, made out of thin steel.  The guys did such a great job of shaping, welding and coaxing the metal into the exact shape I drew, I was so impressed!

So I took it home and drilled out all the holes for the mounting screws, and only came away with minimal metal slivers lodged in my fingertips.  I was super excited to get it done and to see if it fit all my bubbles the way I intended.

I mounted the armature to the wall, using only 10 screws (instead of the 72 individual screws I would have needed without the metal framework) and fit on all the magnetic bubbles.  I am SO HAPPY with the result, it’s so fantastic!  Here are some final photos of the finished piece!

After attaching all the magnets, I had an epiphany that the BMFA did not, in fact, have any sort of metallic wall or structure in their gallery.  This was compounded by the idea that if the sculpture didn’t sell, it would be installed on my own wall… which just happens to be drywall… not metal.  So I formulated a VERY last minute plan.  The day before the BMFA show I got a big 6 inch x 6 foot piece of sheet metal and bunched up all my bubbles so they would cram on to the metal.  I was relatively happy with the look, so I submitted it to the show.

Fast forward to a month later… I get my piece back from the show (no, it didn’t sell) and so I put it up in a corner of my studio so I can mull it over.  After a while, I realized it was completely unresolved.  The problem was, the beauty of each individual glass piece got lost because they were all crammed so close together.  The piece needed space.  And context.  And purpose.  And to be freed from the confines of a rectangular piece of sheet metal!

By this time it is August, and I thought it would be a good idea to take the bubbles to a few unlikely spots to photograph them in different arrangements.  This got me thinking that the bubbles needed to be positioned in such a way as to suggest movement and flow.  Looking back, it was interesting to see that for my first attempt I chose to stagnate the piece by confining it to a rectangular shape, but when I wasn’t confined by a mounting plate, I had a tendancy to stretch the bubbles out, in more of a wavy pattern.  The result is an installation that had some continuity to it.

So here I am now at the end of October, and I am getting ready to submit the piece to the TTMAG Juried Show next month.  I finally feel like I have resolved the piece to my satisfaction.  All that’s left is to finish my new mounting armature and I can finally say that I am DONE!  In the next couple of days I will share the end of my process and post some images of the final piece.

Sometimes the creative process can be such a long and drawn out affair.  I often wonder if I will ever really be satisfied with the end result?

I love how my own creative endeavours can inspire creativity in others!  These beautiful photos were taken last month by Karen Alexandre, who visited Infinite Glassworks on the Autumn Leaves Studio Tour.  She captures the bright saturated colours, and the beautiful refractions of light on glass.  What I found particularly striking was how she defined texture in her photos …especially with the macros, but also with the last shot of the bottles through the condensation on the window.  Thanks Karen, they’re gorgeous!

After it was all over, I collapsed on the couch then immediately started planning next year’s tour!  I have an elaborate plan involving letting the public into our whole downstairs of the house… not just the gallery part, so that means I have a TON of work to do before next year… painting, renovating and making WAY MORE GLASSWORK!  I can only imagine how much cleaning and housework might be involved in this plan… which anyone who knows me can attest that it is my least favourite activity :).  However, it could be so incredible to have more space to show!

I am getting back into the studio in a couple of weeks hopefully, and I am bursting with new and fun ideas… especially some new lighting designs I’ve been dreaming of.  Since this was my last weekend being open, I ripped apart the gallery today, moved some furniture and sorted through lots of odds and ends… just to get myself ready to take on some new projects!  Hooray!

September 30th – October 2nd from 10am – 5pm daily

We will have friendship balls, wine stoppers,  tumblers, vases, bottles, bowls and goblets, and more!  Our guest artist is Wendy Bachiu, who works in acrylics, watercolours and cold wax/oils.

Hope to see you there!