glass is an alchemic blend of sand and
metallic oxides combined with
extraordinary blinding heat the result
is a material that flows and drips like
honey
when it’s hot glass is alive
it moves gracefully and inexorably in
response to gravity and centripetal
force it possesses an inner light and
transcendent radiant heat that make it
simultaneously one of the most
fascinating and one of the most
frustrating and technically challenging
materials for an artist to work with the
glass itself is unforgiving and the
glass gods are all-seeing and utterly
malevolent one single misstep in the
mixing or the melting or the making or
even the cooling of glass results in
shattered glass and failure I was
looking for the largest building I could
possibly find for the least amount of
money when I bought this farm in western
Massachusetts in 1976 I took it as a
good omen when I found several handmade
marbles outside the kitchen window and
when I brought them inside and washed
them off they were just as bright and
fascinating as they were the sunny
summer afternoon they went missing maybe
70 years before when kids were called in
for supper the first visitor that I ever
had to my studio was a schoolteacher and
when I told her what I did for a living
she asked me if I would be willing to
demonstrate glassblowing to all the
eighth graders in the county and I
readily agreed not realizing that that
decision would take me and my work
flying in a totally
direction glass glass furnaces are kind
of like farm animals they need to be
looked after intended to both day and
night month after month year after year
walking back and forth between my studio
and my my house I couldn’t help but be
amazed by dawn and the night sky
thunderstorms down the valley and
Aurora’s and all the other natural and
celestial phenomenon that I would that
just surrounded me and it’s not really
amazing that all of that came out and
started to come out in my work what I
didn’t realize was that there were
zillions of eighth graders in the county
and that I’d inadvertently agreed to
give a demonstration every Wednesday
afternoon for months and months and this
is my furnace this is my studio at night
it looks kind of medieval but in fact my
studio is a modern makerspace for glass
that with history and roots that go back
at least 2,000 or more years now I don’t
know if any of you have ever known an
eighth grader these are people who will
suffer no boredom whatsoever in their
lives they were not the slightest bit
interested in me making vases or bowls
or bottles I thought about the marvels
that I’d found outside my house and I
began to make cats eyes and swirly
marbles and things like that for them
and they seem to like that but one night
I was thinking about this photograph and
I was thinking about Neil Armstrong and
when Neil Neil observed he said I put up
my thumb and shut one eye and my thumb
blotted out the planet Earth I didn’t
feel like a giant
I felt very very small and of course if
you get the right distance in the right
perspective our world which seems so
limitless is just a little blue marble
floating in the black void of space so
the next day instead of making marbles
for these kids I began to make planets
for them planets are just a simple
sphere but they’re visually compelling
and they give me a chance to use every
conceivable glass technique that I’ve
ever learned and I found that they
managed to transcend age and gender and
culture and language and religion and
sometimes even time now in the past 40
or 50 years my planets have taken me all
they’ve travelled all over the world and
I’ve gotten to go with him on occasion
in this case to Saudi Arabia and my work
in Kuwait I even got to meet the Pope
and I was really worried when he reached
out his hand to shake my hand I thought
my own hand might start to burn and
shrivel proving proving once and for all
that everything that my mother said
about me when I was a kid was true I’m
not sure what has held my attention
about class for the last nearly 50 years
I know it’s not just the chemistry or
the color or the heat or the complexity
of it I think sometimes it’s just the
sheer challenge to make anything at all
out of a 2,000 degree unruly and
uncooperative liquid it’s just this
amazing material so I’ve been committed
since I started to blow glass to making
every single piece every single piece
that leaves my studio is something I’ve
made myself often and always but with
the help of my assistants
I’m going to show you how I make a mega
world I begin by spending sometimes
weeks or months making the little tiny
pieces that go inside and just as our
world started out as a molten mass mind
you too
I begin by taking a small little gather
on the end of my blowpipe gathering up
layer after layer after that to first
make an inner world that you might not
see if you’re looking at it from the
outside unless you turn it over each
succeeding layer I do something else too
in this case I’m putting continents on
now get it hot and I’ll add little tiny
fragments of glass that are made ahead
of time some of them are quite
complicated and they become walled
cities or geological features or I often
put gold and silver on the planet’s
surface actually silver accounts for all
the blue colors in my work I use the
dental drill sometimes to engrave the
glass and a torch to heat up little
pieces of glass that can add color it
has to be reheated back and forth in the
furnace over and over again in order to
keep it liquid and on each succeeding
layer it gets heavier and bigger and it
becomes really it’s kind of like
watching like me and my team I think
it’s kind of like watching a bunch of
football players try to do ballet it’s
really exhausting you can’t stop once
you start a piece you have to go all the
way through to the end I warm up my
gloves pick this piece up and I’ll put
it into a cooling oven it’s actually at
about just shy of a thousand degrees
where it’ll stay for up to 16 weeks I do
make other work and lately I’ve been
completely enamored with making plates
or discs that are meant to be my idea of
what it’s like to look through Hubble’s
lens at some distant universe or that’s
a whole photo right there and a close-up
of one of my place
I’d like to introduce my crew of planet
makers half of them work part-time but
these are incredibly skilled people and
they are incredibly helpful and they all
absolutely are dedicated to having a
good time I also want to introduce my
wife Katie Collman I make planets but
katie is an absolutely amazing explorer
of planets out of 2700 applicants in
1992 NASA chose three women to be
astronauts and Katie was one of them
she’s made two space shuttle flights and
her third flight was aboard a Russian
Soyuz rocket launched from the Baikonur
cosmodrome in Kazakhstan where she spent
almost six months in space and of course
she brought along one of my little
planets a little planet in orbit in
zero-g
in orbit around our little planet
floating in the black void of the
universe thanks
[Applause]
you
metallic oxides combined with
extraordinary blinding heat the result
is a material that flows and drips like
honey
when it’s hot glass is alive
it moves gracefully and inexorably in
response to gravity and centripetal
force it possesses an inner light and
transcendent radiant heat that make it
simultaneously one of the most
fascinating and one of the most
frustrating and technically challenging
materials for an artist to work with the
glass itself is unforgiving and the
glass gods are all-seeing and utterly
malevolent one single misstep in the
mixing or the melting or the making or
even the cooling of glass results in
shattered glass and failure I was
looking for the largest building I could
possibly find for the least amount of
money when I bought this farm in western
Massachusetts in 1976 I took it as a
good omen when I found several handmade
marbles outside the kitchen window and
when I brought them inside and washed
them off they were just as bright and
fascinating as they were the sunny
summer afternoon they went missing maybe
70 years before when kids were called in
for supper the first visitor that I ever
had to my studio was a schoolteacher and
when I told her what I did for a living
she asked me if I would be willing to
demonstrate glassblowing to all the
eighth graders in the county and I
readily agreed not realizing that that
decision would take me and my work
flying in a totally
direction glass glass furnaces are kind
of like farm animals they need to be
looked after intended to both day and
night month after month year after year
walking back and forth between my studio
and my my house I couldn’t help but be
amazed by dawn and the night sky
thunderstorms down the valley and
Aurora’s and all the other natural and
celestial phenomenon that I would that
just surrounded me and it’s not really
amazing that all of that came out and
started to come out in my work what I
didn’t realize was that there were
zillions of eighth graders in the county
and that I’d inadvertently agreed to
give a demonstration every Wednesday
afternoon for months and months and this
is my furnace this is my studio at night
it looks kind of medieval but in fact my
studio is a modern makerspace for glass
that with history and roots that go back
at least 2,000 or more years now I don’t
know if any of you have ever known an
eighth grader these are people who will
suffer no boredom whatsoever in their
lives they were not the slightest bit
interested in me making vases or bowls
or bottles I thought about the marvels
that I’d found outside my house and I
began to make cats eyes and swirly
marbles and things like that for them
and they seem to like that but one night
I was thinking about this photograph and
I was thinking about Neil Armstrong and
when Neil Neil observed he said I put up
my thumb and shut one eye and my thumb
blotted out the planet Earth I didn’t
feel like a giant
I felt very very small and of course if
you get the right distance in the right
perspective our world which seems so
limitless is just a little blue marble
floating in the black void of space so
the next day instead of making marbles
for these kids I began to make planets
for them planets are just a simple
sphere but they’re visually compelling
and they give me a chance to use every
conceivable glass technique that I’ve
ever learned and I found that they
managed to transcend age and gender and
culture and language and religion and
sometimes even time now in the past 40
or 50 years my planets have taken me all
they’ve travelled all over the world and
I’ve gotten to go with him on occasion
in this case to Saudi Arabia and my work
in Kuwait I even got to meet the Pope
and I was really worried when he reached
out his hand to shake my hand I thought
my own hand might start to burn and
shrivel proving proving once and for all
that everything that my mother said
about me when I was a kid was true I’m
not sure what has held my attention
about class for the last nearly 50 years
I know it’s not just the chemistry or
the color or the heat or the complexity
of it I think sometimes it’s just the
sheer challenge to make anything at all
out of a 2,000 degree unruly and
uncooperative liquid it’s just this
amazing material so I’ve been committed
since I started to blow glass to making
every single piece every single piece
that leaves my studio is something I’ve
made myself often and always but with
the help of my assistants
I’m going to show you how I make a mega
world I begin by spending sometimes
weeks or months making the little tiny
pieces that go inside and just as our
world started out as a molten mass mind
you too
I begin by taking a small little gather
on the end of my blowpipe gathering up
layer after layer after that to first
make an inner world that you might not
see if you’re looking at it from the
outside unless you turn it over each
succeeding layer I do something else too
in this case I’m putting continents on
now get it hot and I’ll add little tiny
fragments of glass that are made ahead
of time some of them are quite
complicated and they become walled
cities or geological features or I often
put gold and silver on the planet’s
surface actually silver accounts for all
the blue colors in my work I use the
dental drill sometimes to engrave the
glass and a torch to heat up little
pieces of glass that can add color it
has to be reheated back and forth in the
furnace over and over again in order to
keep it liquid and on each succeeding
layer it gets heavier and bigger and it
becomes really it’s kind of like
watching like me and my team I think
it’s kind of like watching a bunch of
football players try to do ballet it’s
really exhausting you can’t stop once
you start a piece you have to go all the
way through to the end I warm up my
gloves pick this piece up and I’ll put
it into a cooling oven it’s actually at
about just shy of a thousand degrees
where it’ll stay for up to 16 weeks I do
make other work and lately I’ve been
completely enamored with making plates
or discs that are meant to be my idea of
what it’s like to look through Hubble’s
lens at some distant universe or that’s
a whole photo right there and a close-up
of one of my place
I’d like to introduce my crew of planet
makers half of them work part-time but
these are incredibly skilled people and
they are incredibly helpful and they all
absolutely are dedicated to having a
good time I also want to introduce my
wife Katie Collman I make planets but
katie is an absolutely amazing explorer
of planets out of 2700 applicants in
1992 NASA chose three women to be
astronauts and Katie was one of them
she’s made two space shuttle flights and
her third flight was aboard a Russian
Soyuz rocket launched from the Baikonur
cosmodrome in Kazakhstan where she spent
almost six months in space and of course
she brought along one of my little
planets a little planet in orbit in
zero-g
in orbit around our little planet
floating in the black void of the
universe thanks
[Applause]
you
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