Masahiro Sasaki Guest Artist Demonstration

well welcome to the corning museum of glass and our Late Show all the way here at 6 p.m. The Late Show this is very special demonstration that we have this evening we have Masahiro Suzuki and he will be making a beautiful piece of glass for us all this evening he is teaching just across the parking lot at our educational facility called the studio and he is here all week long he's been working with students from all around the world he's visiting us from Japan so he's come over to make a fantastic piece of his work and he is brought along with him his team so he's got Haruna Oki naomi takahashi and Kenia Yoshida did I get it yeah let's give the team a warm welcome we also have all of the Corning team on standby we've got G Bryan Jeff we've got Katy Hubbs Benjamin Ewing my name is Michael beam we've got Amanda running the live stream we've got Eric he'll be running camera and then also up in the a/v booth we've got Kayla today so we have a whole crew here let's give them all a round of applause as well so he's begun the process he's gathered some clear molten glass from our glass melting furnace that glass comes out of there 2100 degrees Fahrenheit and it has that orange glow because it's so hot now he's picked up one of our larger blow pipes which is an indication to me that he's going to be making something on the larger side as far as work goes we have a variety of blow pipes and solid stainless steel irons that we can work on and when we pick up those larger ones that means that we're probably planning just to make something a little bit bigger so you goes back to the furnace gets another one of those gathers of glass and he's stripping a little bit right off the end so that's a good visual to see how hot that material is now we also have an animation that we can place that you get a good idea of what that gathering process looks like if we take away the side of our furnace we have 1,000 pounds of glass sitting in a large ceramic bowl we plunge the pipes beneath the surface of that glass and we spool on the additional material so 2,100 degrees our glass is a bit like table honey it's runny it's gooey it flows can't support its own weight so we're always building that glass up in those layers so as we work through the process he'll keep adding on these additional layers as he wants to increase the size and increase the scale so in between we allow the bubble to cool down so that it becomes rigid and stable so that can support the weight of the additional glass so in the center of the stage that is our glass melting furnace it is a bit of the heartbeat of the operation and then on the left side of the stage that's our reheating furnace or and that allows us to keep the glass hot and workable throughout the entire process so you'll see us working back and forth between the bench and that repeating furnace constantly maintaining the temperature of the glass so Masahiro is just working on inflating the glass shaping the glass up so that he gets it to the right form that he wants before going back to the furnace and collecting that next layer so he's using a couple of different tools these tools or the metal jacks they're one of our most versatile tools here in the glass studio you'll see those used quite a bit used a wooden scoop tool called a block to shape Center cool the glass used some newspaper to shape the glass as well so we have a variety of tools most of them are specific to the glass making process and design made specifically for glass making so the gathering the collection of the glass there's a bit of a waiting game that happens we want this bubble to cool down and become stable and rigid so we can get that next layer of glass and then when we're ready to start inflating the glass after we take that next gather we're waiting for that interior bubble to warm back up so it's a bit of this back and forth and there's a lot of waiting just while we work on collecting the glass now every time we do collect glass we can get two maybe even three times the amount of material and that's just because of the increased surface area so these gathers will keep getting larger and larger as we move through the process now we do just rip off some of that additional material we call that a strip so we strip that glass right off the end it's a good way for us to control the size of the gather control the amount of glass that we have or need and it also gives us good control for shaping up that glass into the wooden block so those wood blocks give us a really uniform shape in the material and these wood blocks are soaked in water all the time so the hot glass touches the water in the block the water turns to steam and then the glass riots on a thin layer of steam within that block and that one's actually about a year old so they last quite a while with that layer of steam in between that wood block and then in the newspaper of course that's about eight to ten sheets folded up soaked in water as well that one lasts maybe three or four days now unless it doesn't last quite as long now but that's the local newspaper that's the Corning leader and this one we folded up just fresh today so this one's brand new you'll probably see actually a little more smoke coming off of that one as opposed to this older one that we have now that we've been using for several days you can see the nice carbon buildup on that starts to get a little thin starts to get a little warmer a little bit faster and that's when we know it's time for a new one so masa here will be working in all clear today now if we wanted to add color we typically add color early on in the process you can see all of the different pieces that we have along in front of our stage there are all different colors and we order those from a company in Germany they make them by adding to put metal oxides to the raw material during the melting process but all clear is really really beautiful and it's also one of the trickier methods to work you can actually hide a lot with clear glass or with color in glass you can cover up a lot of mistakes now both clear glass and can't really hide anything but there's something really beautiful about just the clear so that's just some some compressed air that he's using to cool down that bubble initially and that's to speed up the process just make that glass cool down a little more quickly and add that stability so we're using soda-lime glass here in our studio it's the most common kind of glass in the world Windows bottles jars it's all soda lime glass but then there are different recipes of soda lime glass so it's just like if you are going to make a carrot cake at home and I'm going to make a carrot cake at home it's all still carrot cake but it may be a little bit different I might use more butter than you put it's all carrot cake similar thing with our soda lime glass it's three main ingredients the silica the sand soda ash and limestone these soda ash is the flux that allows us to melt our glass at a lower temperature it allows that glass to stay hot for a long time and the limestone is a stabilizing agent to all of those things combined we get soda lime glass but of course our glass is formulated specifically for glassblowing so it stays hotter a little bit longer we can work with it for quite a while glass that's made in the factory if it's blank that's a it's it's a machine that makes bottles for example that glass will be blown into a mold and then that mold opens up and if that glass is still hot when the mold opens up it will just slump right back into a puddle so that glass cools down much faster than our glass cools down here and there are different companies that make glass for glassblowing and Masahiro said that this is the first time using the kind of glass that we're using in our studio even just across the parking lot at our educational facility at the studio they're using a different kind of glass still soda lime glass still made for glassblowing but it's just a different company that manufactures that glass so they said that he's asking me several different questions before we started who's asking me now what's the working time like how long does it take he back up how long does it take to cool down what's the tolerance of that glass can it get fairly cold before it cracks and breaks so all things that he wanted to know so that he had a good idea going into this piece so that he didn't really come up to any surprises but he'll probably as he works through he'll get a good sense of the timing and the way the glass cools even just in between these gathers to understand the workability of this glass so what are we thinking how many more gatherers do you have in mind oh yeah how many more yeah how many more gathers do you think during that one more gather all right sure so you said one more gather and then we'll start to blow this up so of course again the more gathers more glass we have the larger we can make things I was trying to convince him to make something this big he said we don't have enough time you won't want to watch to make something that large but these pieces that he's making and the pieces that he's really known for will be inflated quite thin so this is going to become pretty large in scale so goes for that last gather and this last gather is always exciting he'll come out quite a bit of glass yeah there we go the oohs and the ahhs and then of course if you feel the need at any point to applaud or cheer oh and I just you know do that at your leisure whenever you feel feeling so inclined [Applause] so we are using stainless steel pipes the stainless steels are relatively poorer conductor of heat that's what allows us to have 2,000 degree glass on one end hang on to the glass comfortably that are hang onto the pipe comfortably in the center and then put our mouth on the other end yeah but those pipes do get warm sometimes so we came out of the furnace went to our little wat water feature here in the glass studio and that water feature we just call it the pipe cooler and we cool off the blowpipe so that it isn't so hot that we can't handle it but if you look closely at those pipes there is an area that's tarnished and that tarnished area is a good indication for how far up the pipe the heat is traveling and if you're a quick learner you will maybe only grab that hot part of the pipe once you're a little slower maybe only twice and maybe many more times in that glass blowing isn't really for you but we do learn very early on one of the first things in the glassblowing studio is just safety we go over safety how to move around the studio now what is hot what is not we assume that everything is hot that's a really good rule people are always asking how often do you get burned and it's not super common that we get burned from the glass and that's actually quite rare we know the glass is hot it's more likely that we will touch that hot part of the pipe we'll use one of our metal tools on the surface of the glass and then we'll touch the metal tool we'll get a little burn that way but for the most part we learn all of that very early on process so we got that last gather on we're going to start inflating this now and we do so in small steps and stages if we want when the glass comes out of the furnace and it's really hot we could blow as hard as we possibly could we can make a really large really thin bubble this amount of glass we could probably inflate so big I could fit inside of that bubble but of course then there's no structure there's no form so we have to be pretty calculated about how we inflate the glass and how we shape the glass because 2,000 degrees that glass inflates so easily if you can blow out a candle you can blow up glass we're not blowing really hard through the pipe now anytime that Masahiro is touching the glass the part that he's touching he's cooling down so he's actually inflating the opposite part of the glass so it's really that the air is following the path of least resistance so the hottest thing is what will be inflating so you can see we've got fantastic teamwork happening here we've got the team of force Masahiro he's what we call the gaffer he's the person sitting at the bench he's leading the team he is in charge of this piece and the way that it all works out and all of his assistants they are all working for him so he's in charge of telling them what he needs when he needs it you can see we have someone blowing through the pipe turning the pipe and then shielding him from some of the heat that's radiating off of that large bubble 2,000 degree glass and then also using that compressed air to blow the smoke from that newspaper out of his face and out of his eyes if you've ever been around a campfire and you got smoke in your eyes and your eyes burned and kept it close your eyes that's not ideal in the glass studio when you have 2000 degree glass on the end of a pipe but you're working on keeping centered and running true in the middle of that pipe so teamwork is super important and it's very common to see glass making happen in teams like this the larger the more complex a piece is going to be the more people you will have on your team so I've seen teams as large as ten or twelve people all working on one piece of glass everyone has their designated job and then it's the gaffer's job to be making sure everyone on that team is doing what's required now the longer that you work in glass the more you have an idea of what's going on and what the next step will be we say we all kind of speak the same language it's the same glass language we know the steps we know the process so we have a pretty good understanding of what has to happen and win some I love this part this torch use these for instance and Masahiro came over the other day to get prepped for this show we asked him what he needed and one of the things that he wanted was that larger torch he wanted a bigger torch than what we normally have and that's very fun for me as a glassblower I think we're all a little bit pyromaniacs so the larger torch heats a larger more broad area and you'll see when we get through a little deeper into the process deeper into this piece it's going to be quite large and he wants to heat areas fairly specifically for the what he's planning to make so that large torch will help him accomplish that but he was really focusing the heat up towards the top just near the end of the blowpipe and he's doing that so that pretty soon I'm guessing he's going to put in the constriction just off the end of the pipe and that constriction is a designated braking point so we call it the neckline or the jack line and that's an area that we can separate the piece so you can see everything we have it has one of these constrictions on the end but the thing that goes into the furnace first the end where that newspaper is that gets hotter first it's needing the furnace longer it's the first thing in it's the last thing out so you can use that torch as well to build up some of that heat build up some of that temperature on the back end that's not getting quite as much time in the furnace you'll also notice that he's constantly turning this glass keeping it centered on the end of the pipe and that turning is something that we have to learn very early on because if we can't turn evenly if we can't turn consistently nothing on the end of the pipe will be even or consistent but there isn't really anything that we do in our daily lives to train our hands to be turning something concrete that turning is almost so this is getting blown up quite a bit and you can see on the front of our reheating furnace we have multiple doors we have three sets of doors on that furnace and gee Brian is probably gonna grab one more of those doors opening that up a bit further just so that Masahiro has more space to get out of that furnace when he comes back that glass will be moving around a bit more so it's nice to have the extra room to sneak out of that furnace yeah there we go swinging out around the world anytime you see us hanging the pipe down at an angle we're stretching it and they're really helping out swinging it over his head that's also just great showmanship right that's fantastic but stretching and elongating the glass really inflating this so you can see when they switch directions really how that glasses wiggling around moving in that heat and now he works on cutting in that constriction talk to too closely about what the exact form of this piece will be so I'm not sure if it's going to stay really big and round but based on the other pieces I've seen we probably stretch this out a bit further [Applause] [Music] there we go really swing there yeah fantastic so we've got a piece here you hold this up this is a piece that monster hero just made the other day and I think we're going to be making something along the same lines but I'm not sure if we're going to really stretch it out quite as long and quite as tall as this one but you can see all of these additional little spikes that are added on here these will be added as separate individual bits of glass it'll be brought over from the furnace but this is something to give you a good idea of kind of what we're what we're going for as far as the scale this one will actually be smaller than the one that we're making here this one is on a larger pipe and it's more material [Applause] I'll say you will not ever see a beginner do that so we stretch and we elongate the glass and that's all determined by the temperature we're not using any thermometers we don't have any temperature gauges to understand what the temperature is in the glass so we're looking for visual cues we're looking for how the glass is flowing we're looking for how the glass is moving to know how it's stretching to swing it around like this is too hot and we swing around now also if it's too cold the last pools that can crack and it can break as our glass is cooling its contracting it will shrink when glass shrinks it shrinks to quickly explodes so we're swinging around the glass cracks and breaks pieces can fly off if the glass is cold and we hit it on something or we hit the pipe on something that glass can break off at that constriction point so that is something that really you're only going to do after many many years of glass making experience in fact most schools you won't teach students to swing glass around like that yeah but the Steuben crystal Factory were in the footprint of where the Steuben crystal factory was and their apprenticeship just the apprenticeship before you were even a gaffer before he even got to sit at the bench just the apprenticeship was six years or twelve thousand man-hours [Applause] I hope he does just about done stretching as we work through this piece anyone raising edge but they're going to be using the sports a lot to maintain the temperature once they get the final form that they're after with the main body of the best then they'll start adding those let's make those little spikes on the surface says the pieces get longer like this they can start to feel a bit heavier as well because that weight is spread further out for me right this is maybe eight pounds of glass maybe ten pounds of glass but then that ten pounds of glass you're holding the foot away from you so suddenly it feels like 20 and then when it's stretched out even further it's going to feel heavier so moving a piece of glass around this size is really all about leverage how you move your body and that's a great move right there swinging that over his head up on the tiptoes seem swings that we have to be careful we don't smack it on the ground this it keeps getting longer we have to keep choking up on the pipe but it's all about leveraging your body so that you can move the glass around it's maybe not so much always about brute strength as it is about technique right being able to use I hope someone got a boomerang did that for Instagram driven got a question [Applause] we had a question from the crowd if the glass is really hot and when the glass is really hot if you blow really hard does it pop it can yeah we can blow that glass up so thin so delicate that it can just pop we can blow a hole right in the side and then we get just little thin pieces of glass and they'll just float around and they'll be so like that they can blow away blow in the wind so the glass gets thin as we continue to stretch when we continue to inflate the material it's all about the thermal mess the thicker it is the longer stays hot the thinner it is the faster cooling which means that we're going to be taking quite a few frequent three heats now when the glass is also thin we don't want to overheat the glass we overheat it that can collapse in on itself and then it will look something a bit like a race so we're going to be very careful about those heats though I'll be pretty short pretty quick heats the short heats we call them flashes there'd be a lot of flashes just to maintain the temperature in the glass we also have this sliding yoke this rolling yoke that we're arresting the glass on inside of that reheating furnace and it's on a track it's on wheels so that we can slide that back and forth very close to the penny I'm sure that some of you have noticed the view that we have inside of our reheating furnace and we can see looks like we're pretty close to that camera when we stick that piece all the way inside the reheating furnace so that's going to start limiting how much further we can stretch furnace hammer inside there we have a small window and that window is a specialty glass called fused silica and that fused silica was invented right here in pouring in 1934 but it has a resistance to heat here 3,500 degrees now was that your question did I answer your question say your name how thick or how thin would that glass be right now I'm not super close yeah Masahiro is from Japan yep it's from Japan and I'm not sure exactly where in Japan but I know that currently he's teaching at ice-sheet University of Education okay take your word for it Nagoya yes Nagoya Nagoya is the city yeah so he's teaching at ihe University of Education and that's also where he learned to blow glass he also studied travels all around recently here at RIT you did a workshop at Rochester Institute of Technology we've got a good glass program just down the road and I know that he was there not too long ago so he's here teaching a week-long class just across the studio that's our public access students and instructors come from all around the world to take and teach classes and he's teaching a class and it's all about the Japanese aesthetic and I need to ask him if he can summarize in one sentence or two sentences now what exactly that is but I've looked at a lot of his work and it's a lot of really no well-designed really clean beautiful work that elements if the Glasper to drop would its mush or would it shatter is a question from the audience and it depends all on the temperature if it's really hot it's going to than what you probably think of at home as being cold cold in the glass studio is around 1000 degrees so it becomes a bit different but around 1000 degrees 900 degrees if we drop that glass it's going to shatter but if the glass is much hotter if it's 16 1,800 degrees it's going to smudge yeah it's one more just flatten out our large bubble but we've commenced so bringing these additional bits of glass and plunging that glass through the bubble and then pulling up from that bit and what happens is when that bubble contacts or when the bit contacts the bubble and we push it through the surface and drive back up its substance these little hollow spikes create this open and void so if you look close you can probably see that punty iron a solid stainless steel iron plunged through the surface before he starts drawing that up and then he's also pulling up and trimming some of that additional material to make those little spikes now this is why it was so important that that bubble was thin because that fresh material is what's heating up that bubble that large mass that fresh materials heating up the surface and it's melting it so that that class can be pushed through to make these little spikes now if our glass is thick we won't be able to do that we won't be able to accomplish that so he's gonna constantly maintain the temperature of that glass right at the top where that glass is contacting the pipe he'll maintain that temperature with the torch they'll be taking short flashes to maintain the temperature in the glass and then they'll just keep adding all of these little bits so the other thing that Masahiro asked for when we were talking about what he needed for this demonstration he said he needed that larger torch and he said that he needed more bit tires so more of these little stainless steel rods did we bring these bits on that's because they're working and rather rapidly when we're done with these bits we put them in a bucket of water and the water cools down the glass really quickly and then it eventually just breaks right off but when we bring these bits rapidly we want to be able to keep pipes up on our pipe warmer so we have a pipe warmer clearly drinking all of the pipe sticky 5/6 another those pipes are hot those solid irons are hot the glass stays hotter if we can gather glass more easily and if we have a lot of them then we can rapidly work through and we can keep putting pipes up on the pipe warmer so we always have the tools that we need to add all of these little additional bits so the question is are we able to remelt these little bits the cutoff straps the glass that breaks off of these solid irons absolutely clear glass we're going to recycle as much of that as we can in our glasses putting that back into our furnace will melt it down it will become something beautiful another day the glass that's dirty that falls on the ground the glass that has color in it it would contaminate our 1,000 pounds of clear glass in the furnace if we put it back in there so instead we have a company that picks up all of that glass they grind it up they mix it into asphalt as aggregate it also gets used or so if you are driving around Horning and you see the reflection and there in roads or on those stripes that should be some glass from here that got recycled in an industrial fashion so I know that for these forums Masahiro said that he's inspired by organic shapes and making these organic shapes with an inorganic material like glass we have another example of one of this pieces back here and what happens is some of these sandblast the clear areas that spice so he's putting all of these spikes next to each other and they're creating their own structure and then if he sand blasts using an abrasive sand and high-pressure sand blasts away some of that clear he's left behind with the structure of all of these spikes in vertebrates but you can see this negative space stays left behind with is a really incredible thing and he's even sandblasted some holes into each one of those individual little spikes but it's a pretty interesting technique looks like a coral yeah yeah of course the organic look that's inspiration he said as well it's almost like a reincarnation or a metamorphosis from that solid structure into this more delicate hollow sandblasted form I'm actually just nervous carrying it around sometimes we like to pass things around for the crowd to look at I feel much more comfortable if that's something that I made pass that around give it to the kids let the kids see it now but this one I think I'll walk around now so you can see it but this frosted appearance on the inside and the outside both also gives it a bit more mystery so I'm not sure if he plans to sandblast away all of the clear on this one I know that some of these he doesn't sandblast away all of the clear I walk around yeah walk around the folks on the other side here that sandblasting almost has a bit of a softer feel to the surface but he said that he likes the concept coming from san being sandblasted and essentially returning back to san we just had a question and it was what's the largest single piece of glass that I ever seen blown off the top of my head I want to say to make a really large scale glass pumpkin and we put it out on display every October and I think it's signed like 88 inches in diameter it's absolutely massive and they used compressed air they pretty much got this big massive glass really hot hooked it up to compressed air and they blew it into a mold right this is not clear it's sandblasted it takes off that shiny surface and sandblasting away a shiny surface so Masahiro has moved outside of the bench now to apply these bits as those bits are getting further away you have to really lean out around the body of this best and it's over 2,000 degrees it's really putting off a lot of heat so moving outside the bench he doesn't have to lean around all of this large mass he can be more direct above where he's working so he can see exactly what he's doing see exactly where he's placing these additional bits to make these looks like he's working on a big spiral all the way around putting to working them down two-by-two he's also put on a glove as well as a sleeve just to help protect him from some of that heat that's radiating there people are always wondering why we don't wear gloves rarely wear gloves when we're really close to the glass when we're cutting those little bits now that we're doing that repeatedly for a long time it's going to get really hot it's going to get really uncomfortable but oftentimes what'll happen is if you learn to blow glass without a glove maybe you'll get used to grabbing the pipes in a certain spot that you couldn't normally grab onto without that glove it's really working back and forth essentially on a 180 degree axis and you can see that that glass that entire bubble is actually shifting from one side and the other when we stop and we push that bit down we're pushing that entire bubble down so when we will kind of just work by flip-flopping 180 degrees on that pipe that gives the whole piece of last opportunity to fall back on Center so we're always trying to work as we say on center that makes turning certainly easier he's also getting a little bit of air a little bit is out having a little bit of air blown through the pipes helping push out that little spike at a little bit as well just so that it's not collapsing we don't want it to flatten out in on itself so Haruna's bringing all of these bits and she's making sure that she brings them all at the same size so that these spikes are always consistent she and Masahiro they've got this timing down they've been working together all week long and they made one of these just the other day but it's always very simple little gestures so that you know when to go for that next gather of glass maybe she's a head nod maybe just a quick glance but the communication when you know the steps when you are together lives minimal and then when she brings over that bit she's also putting that in a place nearby where he needs to place it down so he's pointing with his diamond sheers he's pointing with his tools where he wants that bit laid down and she brings that pipe up at an angle or at a point that it's close to the glass as close to the bubble where he wants to place it let's go much more smoothly so for those of you that are just joining us here at the Museum or online during our live stream this is Masahiro sassy key it's working on his large-scale sculpture making all of these additional bits pulling out these little points visiting us from Japan teaching just across the parking lot at her education studio and he's got his team here with him Kenya's taking these seats Haruna is bringing bits Naomi's been blowing through the pipe adding a little bit of inflation pulling out these spikes and of course we have the Corning team G Brian Jeff running some doors we got Benjamin Ewing got KT hubs my name is Mike something here over these over this large torch all right so couple questions from the crab one was once we start a piece of glass we have to work on it all night or can we put it down can we walk away something like this once we start we're pretty much committed now there are different ways that we can go about making the parts and components we have an oven called a pickup oven that we can store a glass in at a comfortable temperature now that's right around 1,000 degrees where that glass is not so hot that it's going to collapse onto itself but it's also not so that it will crack no break while the garage killed and we can make parts we just Park them in the garage killed so we can keep those warm and start assembling those but when we work on something really large like this typically once you start you're not gonna stop until you're finished now we can also we have to cool everything that we make slowly over night and over the course about 12 hours and that's dependent upon the thickness so something that's thin we can cool it with a stick it takes more time like this probably cool it a little faster than 12 hours but to cool it over more time will relieve the internal stress and strain from the different thicknesses within the material so the thicker parts versus the thinner parts the thicker parts take longer to cool down and the goal is that everything cools down at one even rate that's what prevents the glass from cracking and breaking so we'll probably cool this down over 12 hours now if we want we could pick something back up out of the oven and we can work on it again but we do have to warm it up slowly as well so if we cool the glass too quickly cracks breaks so the soda-lime glass doesn't do well with rapid temperature change glass like Pyrex or borosilicate glass that's the other name Pyrex is the brand name for a silicate glass has a lower coefficient of expansion so that means that it's not so susceptible to that thermal shock so you can you know take it out so we are working this spiral down the bubble adding those additional parts and components but we do actually have a slideshow brought us some images of some of his work so they can all see some of the images some of the things that he does make so if we could get that slideshow pulled up and get a good idea of how he told works these it's a process once the glass is cold there are different various things we can do we can grind we can cut we can etch we can sandblast the glass so here we go on our TV screens you can see some of these images you can see the way that that clear glass has been tilled taken away spiral so that we are left behind viral structure which is pretty fascinating that's a pretty interesting way to think about a concept to think about what you want to be left behind with when you're making this entire piece now some of these in the slideshow still have that or still have sections now what the plan is for this one if you will leave some of those clear parts or if he'll take away all of the clear and just stick with the spiral structure now I know that there's one that has a one slide shows a beautiful spiral looks pretty large and you can imagine the scale from seeing scale here you probably imagined that some of these are pretty similar in size this one less sandblasting with more of the clear behind the sandblaster and etch the surface and some of these is also put more of them all right next to each other immediately is because when you plunge into the surface of that bubble you're heating up the surrounding area the hottest thing into the reheating furnace would be the hottest thing out of the reheating furnace so I'm guessing that he is being very deliberate about where he's placing these just for the structural integrity all right if you have one hot spot and then you push collapse that area that you push away that spike so if you work around and a bathroom maintains in that structural integrity a little easier [Music] they also said it looks like this one is weird on the inside so you did just tell me that this will be a large spiral so this is one right here the image is a large spiral but left the rest of that bubble behind there's one a little bit further in the slideshow where he takes away all of the clear bubble and he's only left behind with the spice so here's an example and here's one this spiral looks really really large but this is a good example of a little bit more what we're going for here put that finished piece is going to look like once it's all said and done okay so you saying that some of those that look shiny that are enameled it's an enamel it's on the glass thanks for playing that slideshow gala has anyone been been counting how many spikes you that I should have assigned someone to do that very beginning now we're really about halfway except as we go down the bubble it gets larger right so it's going to require more of these bits all right I turn it up so as we're opening and closing the doors on our glory hole we're losing a lot of people at the front and Masahiro is just asking if I could turn the temperature up on that Oriole so we actually have a pretty good control over the temperature of this equipment it's all really nice it's all digitally controlled so controlling essentially how much gas is burning and set with and how much air were forcing hair to increase the temperature and he said that it's getting a little bit cooler just turn that temper so all of our equipment here is run off a forest air and natural gas but traditionally all glass making equipment would have been wood-fired so wood-fired and then coal fire and natural gas we also have some electric equipment that we can use as well so electric glass smelting furnaces are pretty complicated the reheating furnace is the electric glory holes are pretty uncommon yet we do have one here at the Museum doors have the ability to maintain the temperature quite as efficiently as our furnaces do but they call my Corning is here while your class center that we 151 years ago the Brooklyn class company needs to be closer to the Pennsylvania and moves using the Hudson River in the Erie Canal system we came right through the chipmunk canal to Corning and that's because it's a lot more efficient to move your glass operation to the fuel source than to constantly be shipping your hole all the way to Brooklyn so that's why we're here now it's closer to the coal fields fuel furnaces in the fuel a hot shop the electric glass melting furnaces those are becoming more and more common but we do recuperate a lot of the air so the air the hot air that comes out of the furnace it's blown back in with the natural gas so that helps initially burn hotter we're not losing quite so much of our energy or not losing quite so much heat out of that equipment [Music] so the whole thing's pretty hot now you can see it really moving around a little bit of inflation pumping it up a bit further [Music] all right are there any questions and I need my answer at this point yeah [Music] all right so yesterday it some folks watching last year over at the studio instead of rolling boil [Music] my guests Silverleaf we can roll through gold leaf copper leaf as well and when we roll through that it sticks right on the surface and as we inflate and as we blow through the glass those little flecks they stretch out and then we're left behind with that beautiful little metallic surface and we actually have a piece here on the front of our stage that has some gold leaf in it as well so I'll grab that that's one that I'll pass her out I'll pass that one around I trust all of you have but if you so you can see how those little flakes did stretch out as the glasses inflated so we put that on early on in the process as well because if we put it on a smaller bubble we're using less gold leaf right gold Leafs not exactly cheap but I'll pass this piece around and if you look closely you can see the flex start here we'll work our way got a pretty intricate color pattern on the surface of that piece of glass but in between the lines you can see the gold leaf on the gold medal flex in that glass so I'm guessing the hue using silver leaf and that just gives it sort of that shiny metallic appearance on the surface but that gold leaf where that silver leaf is pretty finicky is actually because it's so light that can blow away we have a little table that we set up here that is a little metal box a little metal table we've got little fans that pull air out so there are small little holes it's essentially like like a reverse air hockey table little holes and then we lay the gold leaf down on the surface and it holds the gold leaf down said if we walked by and had a somewhat brisk pace just the air current with our bodies not blowing our gold leaf or heads but just lay that down and then when we roll across it on bubble it just sticks right on the surface gold leaf is really thin like that it doesn't really have and impact on the way that the glass cools but if we tried to put a larger piece of metal in that's a different coefficient of expansion different coefficient of contraction and it's going to to break the glass when we try and cool it we can't use copper we can actually bet copper in glass it's a really close coefficient of expansion so you can put copper and glass we're not so concerned about it cracking and breaking as cools slowly [Music] and a good question every once in a while you'll see somebody in case a copper penny in glass so for those of you watching here and for those of you watching at home this livestream we will put the trade up on YouTube and when we do that will include a photo of the finished piece of glass AB so that once it is on YouTube you can check out the finished piece at the very end but we do have a really extensive selection of YouTube videos post quite frequently every Thursday this summer we've been doing these live streams with different artists from around the world as well as from the museum we've been featuring six of our museum gaffers six per museum glass blowers working on live streamed pieces we've next week Helen Taylor she'll be making something pretty fantastic and think she's got a bit of a sculpture planned for that be sure to tune back in next Thursday but we're featuring the six museum gaffer's who were on the Netflix show long way how many of you have seen blown away wonderful quite a few you but you haven't new Netflix series where 10 glass blowers have been pitted against one another to see who is the best so it's like most of those eliminate one person off the show he watched the whole series did you watch it in one day all at once two days that's pretty good I had a couple people earlier they said they watched the whole thing in one day I said I didn't even watch it on one day I had to space it out but if you haven't seen it if you don't have Netflix talk you can check it out but six of our glass blowers with and they helped the two artists in the final their final piece but later this summer I think later this hog in October the winner will be here doing part of her residency as part of the prize package the museum was involved you know one of our our boss was also the guest judge for the finale episode as well so the museum pretty heavily involved in that show it's pretty cool I'm surprised that there hasn't been a glassblowing show before be sure to check that out so you can watch our YouTube channel you can watch blown away you can watch glassblowing videos we also have pieces every artist that was on the show we have one of their pieces just down here on the side of the amphitheatre you can check out those pieces as well fantastic so we just heard from online just got the reservations today to visit a glassblowing studio because they saw blown away that's wonderful that's one of the exciting things about this show is that it helps really expand everyone's knowledge of life it really gets out there and I bet if you look up glassblowing studio is near where you live you probably be surprised there are a lot more than most people expect they're probably 30 or 40 different colleges and universities around the country that have glassblowing programs that's how most of us learn how to blow glass nowadays traditionally you would learn you'd be an apprentice was commonly learn our university at an art school a lot of times what happens is you take your elective art class that you're required to take your going to your drawing class or something but you walk by the blackboard you know think about most glassblowing studios it's typically a pretty raucous environment there's a lot of music getting blasted yeah thank you I like to describe glassblowing is making cool things with my friends but that's essentially what it is when you get into a college there's typically music oh you're making fun things there are a couple of different benches people Oliver and it's kind of a team environment and then you take one glass glass you decide that you either love it or you hate it if you love it you drop your pre-med parents love that you decide that you're become a glassblower but the school that I learn at is a collectivist a liberal arts ecology since college and meet some sebastian where I learned to blow glass and you don't have to be an art major to take glass fun so you get physics majors biology majors yeah thanks thanks everyone for bringing that piece back to us and in one part we have a strict you break it you buy it policy [Music] all right how we doing out there any other questions like yeah we come up there so we have 1,000 pounds of glass in our furnace how long does it take to run through 1,000 pounds of glass we never run through all of it we never get back down to the bottom we try to run it down Thanks and then fill it back up because if we just let it sit in the bottom of our furnace the quality can actually start to degrade a bit so we do try and use quite a bit before we refill it but every couple days we'll throw in maybe 150 pounds and we'll melt that down but we're never using all of it we could probably maybe four or five days maybe a little more yeah it depends of course on what we're making but we do demonstrations here all day long sometimes we'll make 11 or 12 pieces a day and of course depending on how fancy we make them the other different things that we'll work on sometimes we work on things in between shows or set up special projects or prep work for other things yeah we can we do a pretty good job of burning through it some studios will have two furnaces still use glass out of one furnace and then they'll fill the other one back up and then you can so the studio in these things or two furnaces have five hundred and seventy pounds of last night use one of them throughout the week you'd probably take us closer to two weeks I think actually for a thousand pass but we'll use one first early we'll fill the other one back out we don't want to just throw in five hundred and seventy pounds of glass we throw in fifty pounds at a time you let it now that's just to kind of ensure the quality if we just throw a whole bunch of without a glass in there all at once you can actually get a little bunch of little tiny air bubbles and then it takes time for those air bubbles to eventually rise to the surface and pop so that we're not collecting those air bubbles when we gather glass oh there are many many manufacturers different class what we're using here is called spectrum yeah big one the one that I've used most one that we use across the parking lot at the studio is called spruce pine so we're getting near to the bottom of the bubble you're just joining us here in the museum if you're joining us online Masahiro Sikhi making his beautiful sculpture and then of course we can't neglect his team got Karuna okie bringing all of these bits blowing through the pipe the corning team you're running door is helping recycle pipes now Eric on the camera Kayla up in the a/v booth Amanda running the livestream answering questions the Internet I think that all of these folks deserve a round of applause and encouragement as we near the end of this pieces laughs we've all been doing a wonderful job [Music] we are will love this into one of our annealing ovens and annealing oven is 905 degrees turn slowly cool this over the course of about 12 hours and we turned on a separate annealing oven just for this piece of glass just that slowly cool we don't have to worry about anything else but because we have all of these delicate little spikes on the surface we've actually laid down a thick insulative blanket we call fiber cracks and that's just going to give us a soft little bed to rest this piece of glass on tuck it in for the night so we don't damage any of those points as we lay this down into that oven these annealing oven sir brick bottom [Music] and we also have to remember that as we add all of these little tiny bits that's going to start adding up this probably feels quite a bit heavier now than we first started adding those bit [Music] so the question is when this piece of glass is all coming down and we sandblasted frosted appearance sandblasting away from that materials for that clear that's not the spikes and sandblasting that away carving through the glass so the question is what kind of pressure essentially those sand blasters are run typically on compressed air so we can adjust the pressure that we are forcing through the nozzle but then we can also select different nozzles or direct or a less direct spray essentially of the of the abrasive we can also depending on how close we hold is just like a little gun depending on how close we hold that nozzle that's going to have an impact on the way that it's sand laughs as well and then we can also get different grits of abrasive material so that will get larger pieces essentially it'll be more abrasive and it will carve away a faster car way more quickly but if we get finer abrasive it won't be quite so serious but we can also there are a lot of pieces that we can sand you know we can sandblast and we can essentially sandblasted the design on those pieces of glass so we will put down a resist so we can put down a rubber resist even like a masking tape the glass and will be sand glass that resists will bounce off this the sand from specific areas and then were left with a design that we keep covered up so there's a lot of options that we have with that sandblasting techniques and also sandblast a blank essentially we could sandblast through layers of color and then we could pick them back up and gather more glass help draw blanks Swedish but then it can also finish the surface after you've sandblasted it we can put different finishes on the surface now but still have the frosted appearance [Music] so you'll notice when they put that bid on and they pull it he's got a great vantage point to stick that bit on first of all just because of the length of that iron but then when they flip it over and he cups off the excess it's nice to flip it over because then it's the whole thing's falling back on center but when you cut that bit free you don't have to worry about it falling back on the surface of the vessels somewhere else I'm just thinking about where are the glasses when you cut it also started bring that iron at a bit of an angle more of a 45 then it's straight up and down we're heading to the end of the bubble you need to change the angle that's applied how heavy do I think it is at this point I'll ask I don't have a guess at this point [Music] heavy I'm gonna say it [Music] you can tell it's there because he's working harder also you have to just imagine we're now we're going to happen to this just naturally going to feel you go to the gym and someone made you benchpress a little bit a dish of additional weight every single time you lift up the bar for an hour and a half yeah it's gonna be brutal and then we're also in front of 2,000 degree furnace that's going to add a little full complaint you're further away from it so it's not like you're holding you know 15 pounds right close to your body you could imagine on a small scale just one gallon of milk is eight pounds just hold a gallon of milk straight out it's going to feel really heavy really quick [Music] how often do pieces like this break during the demonstrations that's dangerous question my friend someone knocked on some wood you know we have pretty good luck but that's because everyone that's been blowing last year's last for many years beyond experience we're all pretty well aware of the different risks and the different points that the process is riskier and when you have this many people in a glass studio everyone's gonna be pretty aware of that's different there's different things that can go wrong I'm so now so here I'm just using that torch up at the end of the pipe where that means the glass is connected he's maintaining that temperature there he's really multitask when he's doing a lot all at once but he's maintaining the temperature up there so usually we're fairly successful but of course things are always you know and things can always happen I think that thing's probably break for glassblowers more than any of us would ever want to admit to but they've been doing a great job and I've got to be honest this thing looks so cool right now now also if you first start blowing glass your success rate is much much lower when you first start blowing glass you're probably going to take about an hour to try me but that's really how you learn you learn more from breaking something than from making something successfully if you break it you have to figure out alright why did that break how can I prevent it from breaking future and then the next time you you'll probably break it at the same point maybe you'll get one step further in the process before you break it again my favorite thing I've ever made is everything I've ever made alright hang with me firm it's a bit silly my favorite thing I ever made was the glass pirate hook where on my hand pretty complicated color technique called reticello was the cup over my hands piece of glass with a lot of intricate design that's one of my favorite things I've ever for many years do I use it I did use it I did a whole photo shoot wearing it and then I broke it by accident I know it's heartbreaking but I made it and I got the photoshoot so that's the important thing pictures exist but for a long time the for about ten years Quarry Museum and blacksmith partnership doors were always traveling the world blowing glass on cruise ship and that's actually why we developed our all-electric glass to do that we have here and that electric that we have now because the number one risk to a ship at sea is fire you can have any open flames we developed all that electric equipment that electric and so I was out sailing the high seas so I decided most appropriate that's what my favorite things I've ever made but we're always making new things we're always pushing ourselves to make different things and really when we try and make something new we're essentially just building off of a foundation that we already have so we have to figure out what do we know how to make what techniques do we know how can we apply those to something new or something different and we're really only limited by our imagination especially here at last we have the facility pretty much anything making the greatest pop shop in the world with the ability to make anything anyone could ever want to make and we've had visiting artists from all around the world and they all say that we've done a pretty good job of that this this reheating for instance that we're using right now this is only the medium size four sets of doors in the final set it's maybe three sets but the final set is a sliding set of doors so instead of opening out that is slide off to the side and then we can make really really large-scale work wide and long I could just I could climb in there and hang out as long as top we also have if you look there on the left side of the stage we also have a colored part with all of the different colors that we have and those are just the colors we have out we have a larger storage area of glass color so we're also not really limited in the colors that we want to work with either the most recent thing I worked on well at 3:30 I just made a picture very satisfied with how it turned out last night yeah I had had the opportunity to make a piece during our this six o'clock time slot this late show so I made a larger piece here at the end of this demonstration because if she cooled off and I'm excited to see it too it's like every day is kind of like Christmas when you're a glassblower you make things you come into the studio the following day you open up that annealing oven and you get to see all of the previous day's work so it's very exciting sometimes you get it after wow that looks great sometimes today wow that was and of course that's just the nature [Music] you're always striving to improve your eyes nitpicking your own works [Music] so check out this view right now inside the reheating furnace these spikes check out how close those are to the back of the glory hole to that camera that view that we've got about max it out [Music] [Music] [Music] our lease flights and when the whole thing is moving it's actually moving back at that connection point where it's narrow there there's a constriction that we'll use to break this piece free from the blowpipe later on in the process but we have to ensure that that connection to the pipe never gets too cold if it gets too cold that glass to man crap you can break the whole thing can fall and hit floor so he's really been focusing a lot stop tourniquets temperature using that reheating furnace but an indication that we're about done with dis pieces is the fact that Benjamin is put on this very stylish jacket the silver suit he's going to be catching this piece of glass that's what that means and he'll load it into our annealing oven and something this large it's over a thousand degrees it's pushing out a lot of all of that surface area pushing out that that firefighting suits are made from so we can grab on to this class but if we're hanging on to the glass with these gloves and still pushing out all of that keeps at our body with just a t-shirt it's going to get really warm really quickly so he's put on the gloves he's also put on the helmet so you can catch this and load it into our 905 degree oven really building up the temperature to be so cold drip water on there too thermally stress the glass that it cracks and breaks so is using a diamond embedded file then they'll add a couple small drops of water Benjamins under there to catch that piece of glass breaks free into the oven it goes laying it down on that fiber fracks bed that insulated insulated blanket now that one more big round of applause Masahiro Suzuki his entire team Haruna Oki Naomi Takahashi Kenya Oh Sita ji Brian Chuck Katie Hobbs Benjamin Ewing Eric on the camera my name is Michael thank you so much for joining us [Music] [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Corning Museum of Glass

Views: 660,066

Keywords: Corning Museum of Glass, glass, glassmaking, glassblowing, Masahiro Sasaki, Guest Artist, live stream

Id: ayGEdKvdSJw

Length: 105min 53sec (6353 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 04 2019