Glass and the pandemic

I’ve talked to several artist and musician friends who are completely flummoxed during these months of the pandemic, the news is too intense to have the old work that occupied us make sense. I will tell you the thing that saved me - was glass. After a deep depression in mid-March 2020 when I quickly realized the art world would be in a deep funk for years, public projects would lose their funding, fancy installations in corporate lobbies would not feel right when they’ve just laid off employees, galleries in Chelsea would be vacant of collectors, or even anyone to look. I don’t have an endless horizon to produce, and these valuable years would be lost…. and then I decided to stop what I was doing and just experiment. It had been years since the calendar was so clear.

The kiln I bought last year, and was too afraid to use without a little more instruction. I watched the youtube videos, read the manual and started. All the classes I signed up for at Corning Glass Studios in the summer cancelled, I decided to pretend I was at a residency. Yaddo, the Headlands, Bemis, these were familiar places, empty studio with gobs of time. OK, I’ll just start.

I made dumb mistakes, and the pieces at the beginning were frightening. This one is made from two of the bad ones that I cut up with a Harbor Freight Tile Saw I bought and had delivered. An unboxing video on youtube of some guy in a garage gave me the confidence to buy it and put it together. With a better diamond blade and a connection to the garden hose a breakthrough idea emerged. I could just put the wet power tools outside in the backyard, so what if it rained. They’re wet tools.

Data began to creep into the daily glass experiments, using my old familiar American Time Use Survey - eliminating all the time categories for work, school, commuting and sleep made it more appropriate to ‘pandemic time’ and it gave the strips of 24 hours categorized by color coded activities a connection to now. Eventually I figured out how to fire them with little holes in the top so they can hang on a hook. Follow me on instagram - I post pics of each little discovery.

Pieces got more elaborate, and what I realized - rather than lying in bed in the morning reading the news and worrying, I jumped up to check the temperature of the kiln to see if it had cooled enough to open. Firings take almost 24 hours each, mostly because once the glass gets hot enough to melt at 1475, you’ve got to cool it very slowly or it will crack.

I told this story to an arts writer, Barbara Purcell who moved to Austin recently from New York and explained about waiting for the kiln to cool to see what would come out of it… and she said “aren’t we all waiting for the kiln to cool?” and wrote a sweet profile piece in Sightlines. Stay tuned, I’m still making experimental glass everyday.