New York

Back from a week with my class in the Big Apple, full of inspiration for new projects, old projects, fashion, interior design, new hairstyle…During the week, we’ve seen exhibitions at MOMA, dia:beacon, Guggenheim and lots of small galleries that we’ve happened to pass by. I’ve also developed a passion for Orbits chewing gum, Reese’s peanut butter cups and american diners.

We started the week with Brooklyn, and the D.U.M.B.O Art Under the Bridge Festival. We saw big, red trees that you could walk into, made from paper, people in knitted body suits, and an artist who was being covered in garbage, among other things. We finished off the evening with beer, jet lag, and a long taxi ride back to the hostel. The day after (a bit tired), we went to MoMA, and saw some great exhibitions of contemporary art and design.

Knitted body suits in Brooklyn

Dia:beacon is a recommendation to anyone visiting New York, located 1,5 hours train ride from the city. An old box factory turned into a minimalist museum, with immense areas and equally immense artwork. Richard Serra is one of museums permanent artists, being the reason of it’s foundation. I’ve never had such an experience of art, seeing it in a completely different fashion than most gallerys. In dia:beacon, the audience is encouraged to go closer, go inside, take part of the installations, rather than staring at objects on pedestals.

We’ve been walking a lot, especially on Manhattan and in Williamsburg. That way we found a lot of small galleries and exhibitions, like Gregory de la Habas Between Paradise and Nothingness, which was one of the most disturbing things I’ve ever seen. It was a rape scene, depicted by horses, and I think I was nauseous for half an hour afterwards. But that’s good, I like when art makes me feel something, even if it’s disgust.

Dia:Beacon

Exhibition etc

Back on Bornholm after a long and well needed summer holiday, I got back to work the minute I set foot in school. Our first course was with american professor Jack Wax, who taught us how to use hot blow moulds during three intensive weeks. It’s a technique I’ve never tried before, and at first I thought it was really hard work for results that weren’t that impressive. After getting used to the new (and quite difficult) process, I started seeing the qualitys that are quite unique to this kind of work. By making a mould that is pre-heated to around 600° C before blowing into it, one is able to get detail that is practically impossible in any other kind of blowing technique. I have a lot of images from both the process and the results, and they will be uploaded as soon as possible.

Meanwhile, I’ve been accepted to an exhibition next year, Konstslöjdsalong 2010. From February 6th until May 9th, you will be able to see my Strawberry Kitsch champagne cooler in real life in Röhsska Museet, Gothenburg.

Strawberry Kitsch, 2009

Annual Report

The pictures, both from the first year project and other projects, are finally uploaded. It wasn’t as easy as one would have wanted, but now they’re up, thanks to hard work from my fiancé. The pictures show both finished pieces and tests I’ve made along the way. The tests are try-outs in size, colour and shape, and were never used for anything else. I only show them to give an image of my process. Then there is a section with so called side effects; they’re also tests, weren’t used in presenting champagne coolers, but I’m happy about them in other respects. They work as single pieces, and I think I might be able to use the techniques further on as well. Blowing and meanwhile attaching tin foil was really fun, and I like the way I could smudge it out as it melted.

Before my presentation of the first year project in June, I was so nervous I was almost shaking. Luckily I was well prepared, so when I went in it wore off quite quickly. The jury consisted of my teachers Viki Norman Kert and Elinor Andersson, and external reviewer Charlie Meaker. In short they felt that I had created a bond between presentation and product, and that both expressed the elegance of champagne. They also liked my process, my analysis and found the pieces innovative. On the negative side, they wanted me to improve on decision making; to decide which piece is best and concentrate on that to a greater extent.

Overall, I feel content with my first year. I’ve learned so much, tried different things and got a lot of new ways of thinking. I already miss blowing glass and is looking forward to the next semester. Next year will be different in a lot of ways; we’re going on a study trip to New York in September, and in spring we’ll have three months of inturnship in places we choose and arrange ourselves. I don’t know where I want to be exactly, but I have a few ideas.

The Baltic Sea on my way to school one morning

Feed the beast

A little more than a week left until the presentation, and as usual when I’m reaching deadline, I’m feeling exhausted, excited and scared to death at the same time. My plan is to blow the last items during the next couple of days, and then tie everything together after that. This includes receiving jewellery from Sweden, taking a look at the fur supply in Nexø and using lots of gold paint.

I’ve decided not to publish any pictures on the champagne coolers yet, instead I’ll post images of the finished pieces by next week. For now, this is a picture from my daily life.

Waiting for the next gather

When I’m not blowing, I’m in the cold workshop, grinding, polishing and so on. After long days at school, I’m tired, but still not really able to relax because there’s so many things going on with the project. Then I usually work on related, but not that physically challenging things, like drawing, sketching and painting. Feed the beast, so to speak…

I also spend some time reading other blogs about glass, articles on art and so on. One of those nights I found a new idol, cabaret artist Diamanda Galás. My favourite song right now is her singing Billie Holiday’s Gloomy Sunday.

In my project, I’ve been working with my class mate Monica Alvestad Amundsen. One day we were a bit tired, and this is what happened. Glass is so much fun…

Experiments

The project is moving along, I’m blowing almost every day and I’m starting to get a picture of what I want to present in the end. I’ve also had guidance with guest teacher Susanne Johnsen, that gave me some important issues to consider for the remaining process. I’ve decided that I want my champagne coolers to appeal to a relatively large number of people, so I’m going to make them in rather different styles and expressions. I want to work with elegance as well as kitsch, so I will try to go both ways.

In between, it’s dawned on me that I only have two or three weeks left in school this semester, so if I want to finish other things, I’ll have to to do that paralel to my main project. Today I’ve made a kiln casting mould for the buddha statues, and hopefully I can squeeze them into a kiln somewhere before we quit.

I’ve also made some material tests with fibreglass, tin foil and so on. I still like the idea of making “collage bowls”, with surfaces resembling quilts of different materials. I tried making a plate form from only this kind of materials, but there’s not enough glass in any of them to keep it together. The test just sunk into a pancake-like shape, so next time I’ll have to mix them with thin flakes of glass. I think it can work, and I’ve also thought about trying to blow with this kind of materials. Everything blown consists of a number of layers of glass; you can’t take it all at once. Or you can, but it’s not going to be that much, since warm glass has the same viscosity as syrup. So what you do is take some glass on a pipe, blow a small bubble, wait for it to cool until steady, and then you gather again. For the champagne coolers for example, I take three or four layers of glass. My idea is that maybe I could roll each gather in something, like fibreglass, fibreglass fabric etc, and then take more glass over each layer of new material, and achieve another form of collage. When I mentioned it to Susanne at the guidance, she said that it’s an exciting idea, but it’s also a material study, and that’s an entire project in itself. Maybe I’ll have time to try it in this project, otherwise I’ll do it after the summer.

Material test

The pancake

The first picture gives a hint about what I want to do; a textured surface that at the same time has melted together enough to make it stick. The next picture shows how the edge hasn’t had enough glass to keep the shape, but rolled down into this not very appealing lump.

Aluminum foil

Fibreglass fabric

On the left is aluminum foil melted in between two sheets of glass. I’ve also used it on the outside of the glass when blowing, and then it has more of a silver look to it. The next picture is molten fibreglass fabric, and I really like how it turned out. I hope it looks that good in blown glass as well.

Close-up on surface

Glass Buddhism

Yesterday, I tried one of the moulds for the champagne cooler for the first time. It went surprisingly well, although they’re a bit thin, so next time I’ll take more glass. Today I’ve blown in the biggest one, and that also seemed to work. I tried some colour and a spiral decoration with baking soda (that creates bubbles in the glass), I’ll see what that looks like in the morning when the things are annealed. I’m really happy about knowing that the project is doable; that I’m not going to stand at the presentation in three weeks, without anything to present. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten a cold, so today I’ve been blowing glass with a fever (my class mates are convinced I’ve gotten the swine flu). Can’t really recommend it, I harderly knew it was possible to sweat that much.

I’ve also been doing some side projects lately, I finally got a picture (not a good one, but anyway) on the Paradise Paint vase I made. It turned out a bit more like graffiti than I wanted, but at least now I know how it works.

Experiment with Paradise Paint

I’ve also started making some kiln casted Buddha statues, from a candle holder that I had at home. First I made a mould from Gel-Flex, a soft material that can be used on almost anything, unlike plaster moulds that has to be made in several pieces if the model isn’t conical.

A Gel-Flex Mould

After that, I made a model in the Gel-Flex mould from beeswax. Over the wax model I made a plaster mould, steamed the wax out with hot water steam and finally put glass in the plaster mould. I mixed the crushed glass that I used with pink powder colour, (basically made from metal oxides) and fired it in fusing kiln on 880° C.

When the glass comes out of the mould after the firing, it’s covered in plaster and generally doesn’t look so good. There’s basically two things to do about that; either wash it the best you can and then polish it by hand in the cold shop, by engraving or grinding with pumice stone etc. The other option is to sand blast it and then make a so called fire polish. Around 650° C, frosted glass will turn shiny again, so what you can do is fire it again. That’s what I did, at 660°C. Even though the poor Buddha was at the bottom of the kiln, his neck couldn’t take the heat and bent. Next time I’ll probably polish it by hand. He looks kind of funny though.

Original piece, beeswax model and glass piece

I’ve made four more beeswax models, so the plan is to make som more plaster moulds and do a firing with all four at once. I’m going to use bright pastels on those as well, I think he’s a bit stiff, so he needs the colour.

Tomorrow, we’re having lectures with danish glass artist Marianne Buus, about career and how to work as an artist etc. That’ll be interesting I hope, I really like what she makes, and her statements about her art. One thing in particular, that I read in an article somewhere, was:

“There is so much ugly glass in the world – I better make something that I can stand to look at.”

Monsters & champagne = birthday

After a really nice weekend, celebrating my 25th birthday, I look forward to getting back to work. Last week I had a stupid accident in school, that resulted in a sprained wrist, so I haven’t been able to blow any glass at all from Wednesday. On the other hand, I’ve had time to reflect over my project and what I’m doing. My teacher said that it might even be a good thing, me having to take a break…

Best of all this weekend, except good food and all of my family visiting me on Bornholm, was my presents. From my brothers and their respective girlfriend, I got a subscription for the magazine Craft Arts, that has a lot of interesting glass and ceramic articles. From my parents and fiancé, I got a painting by Swedish artist Mia Mäkilä (blog). Among other things, she paints on antique photographs, and that’s the kind of painting I got. It’s called “Oh la la”, and I think just the title makes half the artwork. It combines humor with something slightly disturbing, which is a brilliant mix.

"Oh La La" by Mia Mäkilä

As for my own project, I’ve taken the decision to make the champagne cooler. After being through lots of ideas, including make-up storage and window covers in glass, I felt that the champagne cooler had the most appeal. It’s going to be mainly in blown glass, although I will be experimenting with kiln casted parts as well. This idea means that I’ll have to make bigger things than I’ve ever done before, both in size and amount of glass. I’ve blown some on free hand, just to get a feeling for it, and tried out some decoration with hot glass.

First attempt on champagne cooler

For this, I’ve made a simple, repetitive decoration with small pieces of glass attached and spun around the vessel. The tricky part is to get them hot enough to really attach to the surface, a lot of them come off after cooling because they’ve been to cold.

Close-up on decoration

Next step is to blow in the new molds that I made last week. They’re really big, so it’ll be interesting to see how that works out, weakened wrist and all.  It’ll be a challenge, that’s for sure.

Project angst

Still in limbo on the coming project and not that well articulated after a really long day. In short, I could say that I’ve broken some of my things, made some other things, learned a lot and can serve a hell of a lot of schnapps in my own glasses from now on. Instead of going into detail on my day, here are some pictures from our last project, which I haven’t even gotten up on the school website yet. The assignment was a hypothetical commission, to decorate the school corridor with some kiln casted pieces (fused at 800°-900° C). Everything is made in model scale; since it was a two week course, that was all we had time for. This is how my project turned out.

The hallway of sighs

Quite often the corridor is filled with people, so I decided to work two dimensional instead of three dimensional, to avoid bumping in to the pieces all the time.

Inspirational pictures for later motifs in glass

I chose to work with symbols that reflect the students, the place where we study, our relations and interests, and the different directions we take both during and after our education. I also wanted to involve the entire room and work with all the surfaces; floor, walls and ceiling.

Sketch for arrows meant to fit in the floor tiles

Filling of plaster mould for one of the castings

Finished model for presentation

Montage of finished installation made in Photoshop

Montage of entire installation, made in Photoshop

Ideas

First day at school after the spring break, just to realize that my teacher was sick and almost none of my classmates had come back to the island. However, that only meant more space for me to wallow in, and so I did. In between the latest projects, I’ve tried working with Paradise Paints, sadly no longer available for sale. It turned out to be exactly as difficult as I thought it would be, and I’m only happy about it on an experimental level. On the other hand, that is often the most useful one. When I feel they are somewhat more presentable, I’ll post some pictures.

This time I’ve only used the paints on the outer surfaces, just to get to know the medium, but I would also like to try gathering over them; a so called graal. To those unfamiliar to glass, that means blowing a quite thick core, approximately a decimeter long and almost as wide, annealing it (slowly cooling it down) and then cold work it, in this case, paint it. After painting, the core would slowly be reheated to about 650°-660° C, and then picked up directly on a pipe. Then another layer of glass is gathered over it, so that the painted pattern ends up in inside the glass, instead of just laying on the surface. Someone that works this way is Fredrik Nielsen, who I met at my internships at Steninge slott. This way he has made pieces with his telephonenumber on them, among other things…

However, my assignment right now isn’t painting, it is coming up with some ideas for my first year exam project. Usually, I sit down and have a brainstorm about it, sometimes by myself but more often with my fiance, who is really good at giving me ideas, and then I have a theoretical platform to base my object on. This time, it’s actually the other way around. I have an idea for a technique I would like to try, but I have no idea what it is going to be. The thing is, our object for this project is supposed to be based on a need for the danish home. When I heard that, my first thought was glamour! That’s a need, right? At least I think it should be. My teachers on the other hand, was aiming for a more basic (boring) need, like hunger or thirst. A glass blower making a plate or a drinking glass, that’s really original…I settled for a champagne cooler as my first idea. At least they can’t say it isn’t functional. Hopefully, my fantastic teacher Viki Kert is better tomorrow, and then I can discuss it with her.

The technique I’m thinking about is working with materials that only consists of glass to a certain amount, like glass fiber for example. In a firing, they’ll be distorted, shrink, change colour etc, which could make some great textures, and a nice transparency. Probably I can’t manage to make something functional from only those kinds of materials, because of their fragility, but maybe I could combine it with blown glass. Around the school, there’s all these big, old pots from the furnaces (the ones that contain the melted glass for blowing). I would like to use one of those to fuse small pieces of glass fibre, to make sort of a collage bowl with different textures. (To fuse simply means to melt pieces of glass together in electric fusing kilns in about 700°-900° C.)

Where this is going to lead me in terms of a functional object, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll decide the technique isn’t suitable at all. I really like it, though, and I think it could be a lot of fun experimenting with. This is a first, quick sketch I made today, maybe it can give an idea about what I want to do.

Glass Blog!

Finally,  I’ve taken the step into the 21th century and created my own blog. After reading numerous blogs on everything from software engineering and artists to swedish gossip queens, I have an idea of what I would like my blog to be. This will be my online journal for my present projects on a glass school in Denmark. Before I came to Denmark, I’ve studied religious history at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and more recently art and glass blowing. I studied glass blowing for a year in the Glass Kingdom, in the southern part of Sweden. That also gave me the opportunity to see different glass studios through internship, like Steninge Slott and Konguro.

Everything we do in school is divided into projects of different lengths, and it is both theoretical as well as practical courses. So far, we’ve had projects about functionality, From object to function, where we developed a non-functional object into a functional one. The second course was Redesign, where we transformed a 19th century object into a contemporary object or installation. After that we’ve had Visualization, among other things, where we’ve learned the basics of Photoshop and photo transfers for glass.

During  projects, I document everything from the first idea, sketches, reflections and even what inspired me to do what I did. I also keep a technical journal for my kiln programs, glass blowing techniques and facts about furnaces, annealers and all the other equipment I use. I’m not sure anyone is interested in what temperature I do a casting, but hopefully I can give some sort of narrative of the bigger picture when it comes to all the different things I’m learning during my education.

Right now, I’m in between projects. Before spring break I presented results from the kiln casting course we just had with Sally Fawkes, where the assignment was to create an installation for the main corridor in our school. Coming up: the first year exam project, which is already getting on my nerves…

A sample on what I’ve been working on recently; a chihuahua straight from hell, belonging to one of two boxes I’m making as a part of the Redesign project. He doesn’t look this devilish without the lighting, but we had much fun in the photo studio that day!

The Chihuahua from Hell