Tom Moore Guest Artist Demonstration

all right good evening everyone welcome to the corning museum of glass how's everyone doing tonight whoo excellent excellent well I love all that enthusiasm and we hope that the folks at home watching from far and wide are also in a good mood tonight because we have a very special guest artist with us this evening Tom Moore's gonna be making a beautiful piece it's really kind of hard to describe exactly what it is but it's lots of parts lots of pieces he's been hard at work over the last few days making a lot of parts and pieces and we're going to be assembling it this evening into a beautiful beautiful piece so we can kind of see the image on the floor there the character is a big collection of different parts I'll talk a little bit more as we go along for that but I'd love to start out with a little encouragement for our team I'll go through and introduce everybody but let's get a big round of applause for the team and Tom here tonight tom has brought his own team with them here we've got Sarah Betty Jonathan and David I'll tell you more about them as we go along a big around Posterous the visiting team here tonight girls of Dane Michael and Benjamin from the seamoth team my name's Helen I'm going to be narrating throughout the evening as well so let's get a big round of applause for our C mob team we also have Brad on the camera Amanda here answering questions online and Kayla up in the booth doing all the amazing AV work here tonight so I hope we're all going to have a really wonderful evening together I do highly encourage questions throughout the evening as well they always pop up both online and here in person and we'll do our best to answer those questions as we go along so let's see we right now he's working on the bird portion of this character I'm going to pick this up just for a second for our audience here in town you can see what wonderful characters he works with this is actually some really amazing things he's been making all these little parts and right now we're working on the bird section they already have the car and most of the other components and things including this trick cup on the top those have already been completed and are sitting in our pickup box over here on the side of the stage so making a very complicated piece like this doesn't happen all in one day it really does take a lot of effort a lot of pre-planning and I highly suggest you check out Tom Moore's website as well see some of the other work that he has because it all kind of fits within this fantastical design you need your picture back alright I don't want to steal your design there so all of this is a combination of glassblowing and glass sculpting you're going to see a lot of torch work here tonight the torches that we're using these are high temperature torches allow you to spot heat very specific areas on that object and so most of what we're going to be working with is assemblage tonight only because it only only have a limited time to actually make this piece this evening so all of these parts can take weeks to develop all the different components so right now Dave's heating a one specific area probably to start to move that glass a little bit again I'm not exactly sure how it all comes together but we'll have to see and learn together so it's gonna be really exciting you're making the spout right now that's okay alright so making the little spout on the side of this probably referring to this design quite a bit throughout the process a complicated piece like this definitely needs to have a game plan you can imagine you don't come into the shop and just wing something like this so we've actually been watching them they've been kind of working in our back shop and you may or may not know we have a secret back shop in the back that allows us to have a small work area to make things off of our main glassblowing stage so they've been back there making all kinds of parts and I'm pretty sure Tom brought a lot of these parts with them too right you did it all here you brought some of the cane from Pittsburgh all right awesome so here let's get this out of the way so you don't catch it on fire so they did bring a few items from Pittsburgh Pittsburgh Pittsburgh Glass Center give them a shout out really fantastic place down up obviously in Pittsburgh but they do a lot of residences and a lot of workshops and have rental space so it's a really fantastic place if you're in the region check it out if you're down in that area but making a spout this is actually just a hot bit of glass push through the side wall you can even see the bits of cane the pattern getting being pulled up into that spout slightly but it's kind of a fun little magic trick for glass floors to just poke a hole through the side with glass and as you pull up it creates a bit of a hollow space so you get this really nice hollow spout form now is is this in general all these things kind of functional is there an opening through all of it so it's kind of one big giant Trick Cup is that what we're looking at it's just one big joke all right so all of these different parts will be tied together with a little bit of I guess relative functionality not necessarily meaning to have a true function so pulling on that spot spout just a little bit to lengthen it out as we're working really glass blowing and the glass making like this is really all depending on temperature now if we get any one part to cold it could start to thermally shock and crack if it's too hot it'll get really movable and really melty and you can use that heat to help shape the glass but with all these little details so you also will start to melt out your details so with all of these different components and points and little pieces there's going to be a delicate balance tonight to be able to keep this piece from melting all those details out or from cracking little details as it's being built so there's going to be a lot of torches and a lot of attention paid to all the different little part as they build it you can already see it's got little Marini for eyes on the side a lot of his characters have a lot of very interesting personalities to them having different eyes different hands different faces features so they're really going to come together and they all have a interesting life of their own as he's making this particular piece I'm actually going to come out in the audience a little bit and talk to you folks a little bit about Cain and Marini because that's going to be a main decorating thing that they've used for this particular piece so a basic cane now this is again something that he had to develop over the weeks prior to coming here but a basic cane would just be a rod of glass you take a blob you pull it between two irons and you create a rod of glass you can embed color into the core of that rod to create just simple stripes made out of glass now those simple stripes can be added to the outside of a bubble you can make other cane with them but they're basically a decorative object so we've got some wood grain cane here we've got some little crisscross reticello in the green bowl that you see down here on the end the these pieces here in the middle the white and the purple the red and white stripes on the top of that bowl those are all ways of using cane so if you can take those little individual canes and you use them to make other canes you can make either pick up all those little rods on the outside of a blob of glass and then that's gonna give you more of a cage effect as you pull apart to make that cane you twist and so it creates this spiral around the outside of that individual cane so you can get that cage effect other techniques are to create like a center that has a bunch of pain then you gather over top of it and as you twist it creates a helix in the center of that cane now we could be here all night long talking about all the different possible designs that you can use to make cane but he has made a wide variety of those and you can see a combination of straight cane of helix cane of cage cane all of these on the surface of that vessel so even the little parts and pieces that he's assembling together there's like individual legs there's like little ears there's little feathers there's all kinds of parts and a lot of them have been made out of these little chunks of cane to get that highly designed bits onto it now another thing that you can use cane for is to actually slice the cane and get what we call Marini and so Marini are a side profile of a rod of glass and so the most simple one would just be a polka dot right you get a core of color you pull it long you slice it you could just get a polka dot so he's got a lot of eyeballs on this piece I don't know how many in total there are a lot cheese's yeah a lot of eyeballs he uses a lot guys and his characters and his work but that could be maybe two or three colors layered up to create the iris and the white part and then the black part around are moving up and creating a bullseye effect of all that different glass so you can get really simple ones or you can start getting more complicated by adding additional layers of glass anyone familiar with millefiori Italian design little flowers so that's just a build up of colors in multiple layers each one of those layers meaning to look like a little petal you can also make geometric patterns if you make square glass and continue to build those up you can start to bundle individual canes together and then repol them so you can get really complicated really delicate designs just buying the layering process of all of these cane to create Marini pulling them down to tiny tiny elements so a lot of that prep work is what was necessary to be done before he even came into the hot shop to create this amazing piece this evening any questions that we have about that so far there's at least 21 eyes on this piece so it's gonna have a good good watch over us when it's finished fantastic that's one thing I did notice looking at the website for Tom and I of course been aware of his work for many many years and watching the development of these pieces and it really amazes me how much detail is in each one of these pieces it's it's one thing to kind of blow out a big bubble maybe put a few few designs on it here and there maybe even add one or two elements to it that's complicated enough but to develop a barely fairly complicated form like this really does think take a lot of preparation so learning how to pull the cane and being able to pull it nice and even to get the thickness that you want for the particular component that you're looking for can also be really tricky and all of these pieces have little spouts they've got little arms they've got little eyeballs there's all these different parts that come together so he's probably I saw a picture today actually of his studio or him standing in what I think is a studio of his and it was just full of all these little parts and pieces and characters so I can just imagine what fun it is to collect all these little things and kind of move them around and see which ones look good together and start working with different color palettes so really unlimited possibilities especially when using all of that cane and Marini so in addition to our furnace we are not going to be doing a whole lot of gathering out of our furnace tonight because they do have most of these components and pieces already assembled but our furnace does hold about a thousand pounds of clear glass here at the studio and that's melting at 2100 degrees Fahrenheit that's about 1150 Celsius so coming fresh from the furnace it's really hot and molten we saw how easily it moved using that spout at the very beginning a little bit of hot glass can do some really fun things but when the glass is remelted or softened you can also continue to shape it so right now he's heating up the very end of this to do what I think is a little tail and I'll apologize in advance if I name the wrong things because it's there's so many little parts on there I might not be able to identify them properly but to me it looked like a little bit of a tail being pulled out of the back end it's again a bird that he's working on and so he's also using a set of crimps now I always say that working with glass it's kind of like working with hot play-doh so you can get all kinds of texturing tools you can take bits and pieces and push them together and mix and match them but anytime you impart texture on to that soft material it's going to keep that texture now the key to success as well as to not get the texture too hot again otherwise you'll just melt it right out but these little crimp tools that he used one of my favorites it's actually called a fan tool and so it has little tines that go at a fan style and you can crimp on the side of that bit of glass to create that fan texture but when creating texture that's kind of unlimited on to what it could be you could use that same prints to create a fin or a feather you can create a flower petal out of that you can use it to squeeze around and maybe make texture on the grass or really any number of design so it's really aimed to the artists vision of what he wants to commedia he or she wants to communicate on how they're reading those textures and how they translate into the piece so again we want to welcome all the folks online as well so it's really exciting for us every Thursday this summer we've been doing these livestream demonstrations and so all around the world we have people tuning in as long as they can be awake at 6 o'clock on a Thursday they've been able to tune in and watch these demonstrations sometimes we bring in artists who are teaching next door at the studio sometimes we feature some of the artists who work here at the Museum our sea mob team and then sometimes we just get special artists that stop by and say hey I'm gonna come into town let's make something exciting and fun so Tom contacted us and it decided to come and visit and make one of these pieces for us so we're really excited to have him with us this evening looks like we're gonna transfer this off of that blowpipe and start moving around a different direction now for those of you who have seen our regular demonstrations you know that normally in a blown vessel you finish bottom half of something then you put a punty onto it transferring it over to the other direction and then you can finish off the top half so generally about halfway through the process you flip that from one direction to the other but when you're looking at sculptural pieces they don't always have a even-steven flip and flop you may end up punting it on the side you may end up punting it kind of at a weird 3/4 angle you could go in to end but it really depends on one how you want to heat that glass because one whatever farthest away from you you can get the hottest while keeping what's close to you a little more stable or if you want to have it so that it fits into that reheating chamber if you make something really tall and you somehow punny it on its side it may not fit back into that hole and everything needs to be able to fit into that reheating chamber throughout the working process so as big as this gets if he starts getting bigger than the biggest door of our reheating chamber he's gonna run into trouble so we would need to make sure that everything is at the right angle to make that happen there's also tons of different styles of pun teas and each gaffer kind of gravitates to their own style and design but beautiful job good transfer there let's give a big round of applause shall we yeah fantastic actually I'm going to encourage you in general to just throw throw out the love and enthusiasm anytime you feel it throughout the rest of the evening all right it helps keep our energy up it helps keep the gaffer's going and also of course lets us know that you're enjoying the show so now that they've got this flipped around they'll start to focus heat on the other end of this piece to be able to shape up the rest of it now I did say that a lot of the parts that they've already made are sitting in the oven here our pickup boxes are great glass babysitters and we're very grateful for them because if we had a hundred different parts that we couldn't put down somewhere that means we'd need a hundred different people to be flashing and keeping those parts warm but instead we can make all these parts put them into one of these glass babysitters and then everything stays safe warm and happy in there so we can continue to make more parts and put them in the box and as you build all those different parts and they're all safe in there then you can start to assemble them together at one time the team has been working together here for the last couple days making all of these little parts and it really has been a fascinating thing to watch yes you got a question sir yeah what temperature we keep stuff in the hot box right now it's sitting at about 1,050 degrees we want to say we've got liquid glass at 2,000 at 1,000 degrees it's pretty much stable it's not gonna move around at all but if we go too much below that temperature the glass can start to crack so as the glass at least our type of glass we're using a soda-lime glass as that glass cools it shrinks just a little bit so thick and thin they would shrink at different rates as they cooled naturally and that would cause stress in the piece causing it to crack fairly quickly so we're sitting at a temperature that's just barely above that danger point but not quite to a point where it starts to move or change shape they've worked really hard to make a lot of really amazing little components so we don't want to melt them all down into a puddle we also run the risk that if that glass were to get too hot they are sitting on various ceramic shelves right now and hopping stick to hot things so eventually those parts would start to melt they start to stick to those shelves and then we wouldn't be able to even get them out of there so yes it's a delicate balance of keeping things at just the right temperature and probably when they start to assemble a lot of these things they bump it up a little hotter just to get it a little closer to that movement point so that they can grab them out and they'll probably be a few moments where we need to just hang out and wait a little bit while the oven recovers its temperature a little bit so that nothing got too cold as we're opening and closing those doors but great question in addition to the pickup box we also have what's called a garage and a garage is gas-fired the oven that we're using there is all electric but the gas-fired oven we don't have it on right now because they don't need it but it has kind of a hot side and a cold side so instead of having to bump that temperature up you can store things in the somewhat cold side and then tuck them over to the hot side putting them over the flame itself before you come out to introduce it to the piece so it's another great tool to help build build up temperature and to store pieces to be able to accumulate a lot of parts all right oh look at that adorable face on there love it so I believe this is going to be the neck of that bird so there's a lot of moments in glass where it kind of looks ridiculous before it turns into itself so you got a kind of pre-plan you got to understand that well if I put heat here and I yank up on this other area it's gonna start moving in one area a night maybe not another area so to get really smooth transitions and curves on to the neck of this bird it's kind of coaxing it into place making sure that the temperatures are just right the tip of that little long piece is probably going to be the hottest and the area near the body would be a little bit colder or maybe sicker so sometimes we're actually cooling the glass in order to get it to be hot to pull in the right place so you'll see a lot of play back-and-forth with temperature and heating and cooling and being able to create the shape that we want the addition of these torches is really a very important step forward in the glass world the particular was a big fluffy one we call it that that one actually is mostly just to keep things warm it's not really gonna get things hot enough to truly melt them so it's really more of an insurance policy you're gonna see them focusing a lot of heat with that torch maybe on the delicate parts maybe on areas they want to move just to get a little bit of heat but then we also have the very very hot torch that's what they're using right now I think this might be another eyeball or maybe yeah okay 27 eyeballs I think she said so it's gonna be a lot of eyeballs and this is a pretty pretty slick little trick so he took a bit of cane that's that solid rod and he heated just the end and used it like a little punty so got it hot with the torch Wynand picked up that little eyeball out of the oven while it was staying warm and happy and then stuck it on to the piece nice and warm and then just kind of wiggled that came and broke free so just like a punty that we add to the piece itself we can use glass rods to do the same kind of thing creating a weakness between those two so that hopefully it breaks nice and cleanly and we get the eyeball attached to the side of the piece any other questions so far yes yeah as a big platter down there we always get a lot of questions about this particular design this is what's called reticello and this is another complicated thing that takes a lot of prep work but it's also using cane so you pull rods of cane lots of cane it takes lots of games to do my cello and you want them all to match you want them all to be in the same size now we use different colors so we can use all the different size you take those individual canes and you lay them out like a bunch of pencils laid out on a ceramic shelf once you have them on that shelf you can warm that shelf up that warms up the Canes just enough so that they stick together they just fuse together that essentially creates a sheet of cane he has also done very similar techniques in using that cane to make these objects as well so you create that sheet of cane and then you roll that sheet up into a tube on the end of a pipe and if you take that tube and you seal off one end that's essentially giving you a bubble so you take one set of cane and you pick it up and you twist it one direction and you make a little cup out of it now it's not a drinking cup it's just a vessel cup shape kind of like a rainbow cup here so it's just a component so you got one set spirals one direction then you pick up a whole nother set of cane that has same numbers and you twist them the other direction and while it's still in bubble form you Jam one inside of the other and so when you pick up that cup you do a stuff cup you get that crisscross effect but the key to success for this one is that as you're making those two cups you've got to keep texture in those canes because you can see even my fingers it's got little negative spaces right so if you crisscross to textural pieces over top of each other where they crisscross they trap little air bubbles so you get these little tiny air bubbles in between each little crisscross and if you get air bubbles from tip to tip you've done the process correctly most the time it doesn't work that well so that is a really challenging process to work with but yes you can use that to make any number of designs and any number of pieces and it becomes one of those glassblower challenges speaking of challenges look at this beautiful curve they've got there now on the top of that bird so really pulling out that neck and it looks like it moved really nicely you can see what a beautiful straight taper he has on that that neck that really shows his understanding of glass the temperature of how it's going to move and being able to get a really nice curve all right so we had a question online about Tom Moore and he's had been working with glass since 1991 now he is Australian glass worker based in Adelaide of South Australia and currently working very closely with the jam factory he was once the production manager from 1999 to 2015 but using their glass facilities as well as his own home studio to make a lot of his amazing work the jam Factory is another public access studio very similar to the one that we have here where they teach classes and workshops and they rent time to professional artists a lot of times artists very rarely own their own studios at least in the beginning so it's really important to have these public access studios to allow artists to one train and learn and and kind of practice but also just to have access to a studio to make the work that they want to make with other our only question online okay thanks yeah keep them coming we'll do our best to answer as we go along so it looks to me mag maybe we've got another punty started up I have a feeling this piece is going to be transferred many many times in the working of this object and that's a really tricky thing to do there's always a delicate balance of temperatures you got to make sure the glass is just the right temperature to get it to survive it has to be cold enough to actually crack but trying to focus those cracks only where you want them and not where you do not want them another beautiful transfer very nice now I think this is also going to be an amazing piece to be seen from the inside of that reheating chamber tonight obviously we have a 2100 degree furnace and the camera is actually located behind that furnace and there's a very special window that separates the camera from the intense heat of that furnace it's called fused silica but the exciting thing is is that we get that inside look to that reheating chamber and when you're doing characters like this there's always some really entertaining moments on that visual from the inside of that furnace so we had another question online about the tools and as you can see or maybe you can't see from home actually but they've got a tool bench they've got a secondary bench they've got pretty much a huge collection of toys to play with here tonight and I'm sure there's a few of them have been personal handmade tools he might have made some of them himself some of them are made by manufacturers but it's a very small kind of cottage industry so I like to say the tools themselves are actually nice the tools themselves are actually a piece of art in their own right there's only a limited demand for glass making as many glass makers as it feels like there are in the world we're a pretty small population so a lot of the tools are handmade this looks like maybe a pickle grabber or something from Victorian era these are amazing so he's got little claws on them can you guys see this these little grab maybe an egg grabber I'm not really sure what those were intentionally made for but this is one of my favorite things you go to the hardware store you go to the restore you go to the goodwill wherever you find use things and you just look through the piles of stuff that people are getting rid of and you think ah I like the texture of that and I bet if I push that texture into the soft glass I'll get some really interesting designs or okay well I need to make this weird shape and I need to be able to grab hold of it to be able to stick it on to my piece and sometimes the tweezers themselves a two point contact is not going to cut it you're gonna end up dropping that piece so the Tong business has really been booming lately with glass makers kind of developing all these different tongs that can hold things either in a tripod effect or maybe I saw earlier he was using ones that kind of went really wide and came in at two little points from from kind of far to the side of the piece so yeah the tool-making is definitely a challenge but I think carrying of the tool bag becomes one of the biggest challenges too because we all really love our toys and it's really unlimited onto what those possibilities are but I don't know the specifics to answer the specific companies that he's working for it looks like he's got a lot of custom tools he's got a lot of our tools out as well so we've just given him the toy box tonight and he's kind of pulling out all the stops to make this happen yes I'm sorry let me come up a little closer I can't quite hear ya and what kind of metal do we use for the tools yeah you know what I've seen all kinds of tools and most of them are some sort of tool steel or standard steel you can make copper tools but they tend to heat up really quickly so generally if you're using a top copper tube or something you might wrap some tape or something around it to just keep it a little easier to hold on to porcelain tools I'm not as familiar with too many porcelain tools but I have made tools out of clay and dried them and fire them you'd have to put a kiln release on them to keep them from sticking because the ceramic does have a chin it's very porous so has a tendency to stick as soon as it gets hot really any of these tools if they get too hot they will start to stick to the glass but I have made plaster tools so you could make positives and then pour or pour plaster in there to create a positive with a certain texture and you can push that into the glass now those tools aren't gonna last very long you know heat will degrade things very quickly but you can definitely make tools out of wood plaster metal pretty much anything that's not toxic when it burns and honestly there are some toxic tools out there too that people have started to use these certain jacks that open up specials that are made of Teflon and oh terrible terrible stuff but there's a lot of tools you're really unlimited it's just whether that tool will actually survive a long process of working with it so like the plaster of course would be a limited use wooden molds would be a limited use if you're wanting more longevity out of that tool then you're going to gravitate towards the metal the cast iron the aluminum we have aluminum we have bronze and brass so any number of things I think glass makers are very resourceful in that way and that again if you can't find it you might have to make it and then you might only have access to certain things to be able to make that tool so you kind of make it work however you can I've also seen a lot of augmentation of tools so just going to the hardware store and getting a pair of tin snips and like Shea part of it to make it a thinner blade and stuff like that so you can also react mate certain tools for that purpose speaking of react LeMay ssin of parts for our purpose the torch that David's using right now is actually a torch that was originally designed for the flame working community though I think here comes the first leg got a little leg with its feet so that torch is usually mounted on to a table and then you introduce rods and tubing into that torch to create an amazing array of objects but we as glass makers in the hot shop I think got a little jealous about the ability for it to spot heat so intensely that we pulled that out of off the table and have put handles on them starting to augment those tools for our purposes so all these different handle styles you can get longer and shorter and everybody kind of customizes their torch but you can see what an amazing ability these torches have to intensely keep very specific areas if you wanted to attach this leg and you didn't have a torch what you would have to do is take a blob of fresh hot glass and use that like glue so you can take that blob of glass and you put it on to the end and then you squish it in there and it'll stick no problem you've got this nice connection but it's kind of like hamburger patties you know you got this blob that's unnecessary in your design and trying to incorporate it into the design it gets a little awkward so being able to spot heat specific areas touching them together even heating in those transitions you can see the bubble right now is giving under the pressure of him pushing that leg and then he pulls it back a little bit to kind of recede it so it's got a really nice contact point and transition from one part to another looks like we got two different kinds of feet on there to love it now we did have some questions online a little bit about his inspiration so I'm gonna take this opportunity I know Tom said he was touch and go whether to show this but he's put together a really nice slideshow so I'm going to go ahead and jump into this slideshow and just show you some of the images from his work and the sect the first part is a video the second part is images of his actual work and then the third part is inspirational things that he is found here at the museum that help influence his work and I have not gotten a chance to see all these slides that was just put together so I'm sorry I don't have a lot of information about it but I think it'll give us a better perspective on the kinds of things that he's looking at for this piece all right for this first video that we are playing is part was projected on the outside of the building of this South Australian Museum I know it had a video action I don't know how if that plays are not there Kayla oh I guess I needed to activate it okay there we go my fault so if you look really carefully at some of these images you can see like the little chunks of cane that are growing up into the upper section you see some little eyeballs and and different falling qualities so there's a lot of little components here that look like they're direct images from the work that he actually makes and all the little parts that he makes now he said it was like a two-minute video and he didn't want me to play the whole thing so I'm gonna go ahead and move on beyond that because we also want to make sure we get some good action shots of all this piece coming together so I'm just gonna scroll through these fairly quickly and then if Tom wants to come back to them and talk about it a little bit more we might have time later but as you can see we've got some really fantastical characters I love this guy the little shark and I'm also gonna read a quote from his website here his fantastical world embraces gorgeous birds and animals that have already hybridized with modern automobiles and airplanes as is and is inhabited by exquisite creatures that are morphing to inhabit a universe that seems quite as ominous as it is beautiful so again a great sense of play lots of wonderful components and characters again that repetition of common themes of the animals and the industry the eyeballs has some really fun clear objects I can see a lot of influence of some of the trick glasses and things that we have in our collection which I believe are part of his conversation looks like in the LUP upper left corner there is an ancient piece with the cage that's kind of a deer or a horse or something I'm not sure what the original one was from also assembling these together with other mixed-media materials to give them certain atmospheres and homes I love this guy too little flame on its back you can even see the the little joints of the legs have those same kind of little eyeballs along the surface but what a lot of personality into each one of these little characters that's guys awesome now the piece that we're doing tonight that will have an automobile added to it as well they made that a little bit earlier so it's combination of those animals and automobiles can also see a lot of use of that cane every single element of these pieces has a decorative pattern on it of some sort of course each one of those being made separately developing the designs in the of the particular cane or amorini style looks like a little reticello there on the bottom path and some of the sketches and the background of this picture really gives you an inside look on to some of that design process as well and again you'll definitely want to check out his website Tom Moore I did a search Tom Moore glass you can find them right there on the internet look a little take a little more time to look at some of these amazing pieces Tom did study glass got a BFA from Canberra school of art and a and you is about 99.9% finished with his PhD at the University of Australia just waiting for those final check marks to be checked as all the work has been submitted so will be a PhD graduate here momentarily and then as promised the Corning Museum of Glass of course has an extensive collection so he also included a few images of the historical pieces that he references when making this kind of work so you can see a similar sense of whimsy most of these had a certain function as well but had a lot of reminiscent of particular animals using traditional techniques like cane making beautiful pieces if you want to see any of these pieces a little closer you of course can come here to the Corning Museum of Glass we've got a lot of pieces in our collection to look at and study you can also reference a lot of things online as well so if you are not in the area specifically you can definitely check out and do some searches for trip glasses and other historical references through our search engines they're on the website and that's back to the beginning all right Thank You Caleb thanks so much all right so hopefully that gives you a little better perspective onto a little bit of the background of what you're excited about all right so it looks like we've got four legs now we've done it been doing a lot of work while we were what looking at images and once he's added all these pieces together he's gotten a little bit of warmth so that they can all kind of be tweaked into the final position sometimes it's really difficult to again find that balance of temperature where things are moving but not melting or not kind of affecting the sidewalls I'm just guessing that this kind of assemblage took a lot of trial and error trying to learn how to what thicknesses were necessary on the bird body so that it didn't collapse while you're putting on all the different components having enough structure all the little details in those feet and everything those thin delicate parts but as you can see he's been working with glass for many many years and it's probably done a wide variety of experimentation any other questions I can answer so far all right so it sounds like we've got a hundred and sixty people tuning in from all around the world here online so thank you again for tuning in it's like we're using some kiln shelf here now as I mentioned earlier we can use those same kiln shelves to warm up the Canes and when they're hot things will stick but it's a really great tool to be able to help shape glass I want to make sure that it sits nice and flat are you picking up the car all right so now we've got a really big pipe and a lot of glass making a really nice punty this will be the punty that the entire piece gets built onto so I was watching earlier when they were making the car in the back and the car is pretty much solid glass so it's all layers of cane squished flat and then blobs of glass added to it to create dimension and then lines drawn on to it to create that form so by the time you accumulate all of these different parts together that's a lot of weight it's a lot of solid glass so we want to make sure that this punny is strong enough to support all of that weight you might notice it's even a fatter diameter of pipe so it's really important to be size appropriate with the the pieces that you're making because you're kind of limited only by a few things here in the shop one you got to make sure the piece is able to fit into that hole the entire time you're working you need to make sure that the people can carry that piece around so organ Amma Klee a more a thicker pipe can support more weight and be more ergonomic to be able to turn it especially on a sculpture like this it's not going to be evenly balanced like blowing out a tall vessel or something you're going to constantly be a little off-balance so having the ability to really turn that pipe and get the torque when it's getting a little off-center is really important so they're doing I think what I saw is more of a sculpture punny more crown funny okay that's beautiful beautiful beautiful so crown funny is you kind of pinch it around the outside so it almost creates like a little donut but it looks like a little crown because it's got little points so this will actually contact on a lot of little points rather than being solidly contacted and then they might even cut in a jack line now we did a jack line on most of our pieces we didn't really see it too much on the sculpture because they've already had made a lot of these pieces but we're gonna make sure that this piece is connected solidly but also has a weakness to get it to break free there's our little car well big car actually you can see all the stripes of cane in the bottom beautiful job and it's a critical thing picking up out of that box you want to make sure your punny is stable enough so that when you go to pick it up all that weight doesn't flop around so much but if it's too cold it won't stick properly so delicate balance but now we've got our car and I was able to walk back again and see some of this be made and one of my favorite things is the wings on the back anybody remember those old cars with the big fins on the back of them so if you look closely the back end of this car has some of those little fast-moving wings on the back yeah nice nice camera work there so the car is just the base and the bird will be put onto the top of that car and then on top of the bird goes a lot of other parts as well so we're really starting to accumulate all of the individual pieces that they've been working really hard on over the last couple days now as we're working we need to make sure that nothing gets too cold so they're gonna do a lot of swapping back and forth reheating that glass finding that perfect balance using the torch to spot heat the bottom of these feet we want to make sure that it sticks together but not move that shapes too much so really finding a delicate balance now if you've watched a couple of artists who have worked together for many many years they may not talk that much but in a piece like this even though he's worked with these folks quite often there's still a lot of communication that needs to take place but if it was a bunch of newbies that didn't really know what they're doing that conversation would be completely different so it really is the best assistants are also the best gaffers themselves and so they are really anticipating the needs of Tom as they're building this piece he just needs to kind of tell them a sense of timing or or exactly what he wants at a certain part in the construction of this piece but all of these artists have been working with glass for many many years so they themselves have that sense of timing already developed as they're building this piece I actually asked them before this evening to give me just a few details about them so I could give them a little highlight here this evening because skilled assistants are definitely hard to come by and these are really great teams that tom is assembled here today so we've got Sarah Vaughan she is holding on to the bird right now she did receive her BFA from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale it's where I happen to go for graduate school as well so I kind of knew her back in the day as an MFA from I RIT and is currently working at the Chrysler Museum in Norfolk Virginia and teaches for the Governor's School and her fun fact is she loves rocks so I didn't get an explanation for that of whether it was you like climbing rocks or you just love rocks or the geology of it all make the RIT make rocks alright sorry I went totally distracted her at a key point there so she loves to make rock so a lot of her work includes rocks now Betty and she is kind of backing up Tom on the pipe they're making sure that can stabilize that pipe as necessary she has a BFA from Old Dominion University in Norfolk Virginia a former Chrysler studio assistant but still works in Norfolk and her favorite animals are bats and manatees this is some really awesome animals to be inspired by him we're getting a really good look at that car now I love how he's used the eyeballs for the lights and the front in the back again I think 27 or 29 does anybody remember how many eyeballs we said 21 oh I'm Way over estimate 21 I'm terrible with numbers so 21 I boss hidden throughout this entire piece so we'll have to see how many we can count now this finished piece will be put up an image of it will be put up online so you can follow up with our social media here within the next couple days it'll probably take a couple days to get up onto the website and to the Instagram and all those social medias but they will eventually be up there for you to see what's that it looks funny in a good way I agree absolutely these pieces are amazing I really love that sense of play that you put into this work here Tom I also feel like this work is a really wonderful example of how we're looking at four thousand years of glassmaking history and bringing into more of a contemporary conversation and really pushing it beyond those classical approaches of glass and making unique items that really speak to the artist who is making them so this has a lot of personality and love and dedication in this work really showing through and really unusual approaches to using that classical techniques like of course traditional blown glass and sculpture and the use of cane and marine II really tying it all together we also have a David King here he's the one holding the torch right now his he says his favorite color is purple favorite material is glass I know he likes making bottles out of glass and also doing a bit of cold working doing some really wonderful bottles with perforating the surface creating some really unusual textures and he currently lives in Philadelphia but will be worth moving to Kentucky this fall to be working at Central College so really excited to see this next movement forward for David and all the things that are gonna happen there in Kentucky and then with the hot job over here we've got Jonathan bola bear hopefully I pronounced that correctly started working the asset Tulsa glassblowing at the Tulsa glassblowing school in Tulsa working as a tech apprenticed at the Pittsburgh glass Center so again if you have any questions about Pittsburgh and definitely grab him while he's here today wonderful organization and the public access to do love drink ware and glasses used for functional dishware so really inspired by tradition and functionality but he also wanted me to mention that is getting married in a month to Danielle yes and wanted to make sure that Daniel got a really special shout out because she's a home taking care of the animals and wanted to let her know how grateful he is that he gets a chance to go and play with glass and be involved in these kind of projects so congratulations to both of them on their upcoming nuptials all right think we're getting pretty close to the a sibling of the bird to that car we call that a dry run right there just a trial size comparison making sure that everything was just right and then faked us out and went back for another review that is really shows the dedication of this team it really shows the expert of this team maybe someone less experienced would just rush through it and try to jam it on there and maybe all the conditions weren't right and then it wouldn't work out properly but they started to recognize certain things that weren't quite lined up right and so they they knew they needed to go back in do a little tweaking and then reassemble that piece when all the conditions were just right one of the hard things when you get glass hot is it starts to move so of course all those little toes are starting to reach outwards as they accumulate around spinning in the heat subtle movements to push that on to place beautiful job very nicely done I don't know about you folks but I was holding my breath just a little bit when that was coming together you kind of never know if it's all gonna work well now of course under the experience of gaffers like this though generally it goes pretty smoothly but there's always these moments where once you've contacted there's no going back you can't kind of take them apart very easily so all of that preparation all that time that you spent in developing the heat developing the shape making sure everything was just right it all cumulates into that final moment and it's make-it-or-break-it during those final moments any questions that have developed out here in our audience I'm gonna come out there so I can hear you a little bit better all right what can I answer yeah the car is assembled from solid glass and if you look really carefully you can see a lot of stripes on it so part of it was canes that were melted together to create little sheets of glass and then they put solid blobs onto it so like where the windows are on their top that's a solid blob of clear glass and then the other blobs are sort of are the sheets of glass were kind of cladding on the outside of that clear glass to create the the roof top and the side panels of the car and then the belly of the car the underside the car has all these wonderful cane stripes on it as well and I'm really excited to see that a used clear glass because it's reflecting all of that color up into all that solid clear glass how much does it weigh probably feels like hundreds of pounds right now but I would assume it's only maybe 20 pounds give or take I haven't picked it up so I'm not really sure it always feels heavier though because it's right now it's on the end of a 4 foot pole so whatever weight you have it doubles for every foot pass Center so it feels heavier and heavier to further away from that glass you are yeah you're welcome ah how was time able to suspend the bubbles in the car like the little teeny bubbles that you see this is a funny story actually I watched this earlier now you can have bubbles added into glass purposely or they can happen by accident so if you're gathering glass out of our furnace it's all fluid but when we fill that glass furnace it's all little pieces that get filled up and as they melt so they can drop little air bubbles inside that glass eventually they'll work their way to the center and pop or work to the surface and pop but sometimes they're just trapped in there so when you go to gather you can either pull them out on accident or you can create bubbles by maybe spinning too fast and glass laps on itself you'll have a little bits of glass so there were a few bubbles trapped into some of this glass but then he's like well I like those bubbles so he actually took and poked the surface of the first layer of glass to create more negative spaces and then when you gather over that the glass doesn't fill in the nooks and crannies of those pokes it actually creates more bubbles so he created three layers of bubbles because he kept poking every layer as he gathered up more and more glass to create all these little tiny bubbles trapped in that solid glass so it's a fun little design in there isn't it yeah so you can really use that as a creative approach as a decorative approach but you can also look at bubbles in glass for historical reference to understand how a piece was made so if you think of a bubble and it's trapped in the side of a piece well if I take that bubble and I blow the bubble the the larger glass bubble out that little tiny bubble will stretch and flatten so it'll become wider if that bubble is gotten hot and swung then that bubble inside the little teeny bubble will actually stretch and so you'll get like a long line out of that same bubble or you can see if that bubble kind of strikes to the side well you know that it was twisted at some point so you can kind of look at these little purposeful or accidental things in the glass whether it's little bits of color or little bubbles and kind of understand how that glass piece had been assembled or moved based on looking at those little things so as you make your way through the museum or if you're looking online it might be a fun thing to kind of think about look at the little imperfections in that glass and see if you can figure out well was it stretched was it blown was it twisted and be able to kind of figure out how that was made without having documentation on that fact welcome yes so we just had a question online how hot is the glass when you are working on it now I will say that that currently depends on the type of glass that you're working some glasses like borosilicate you need to work a lot hotter to get it to go float fluid and some glasses will set up very quickly but our glass really works in a range of at a thousand degrees or 1,100 degrees it's not moving at 2,100 degrees it's fluid like honey so we're really looking in Upper ranges I would say about 14 to 18 for most of the things that we're doing here to manipulate this class now great question online any other questions here in the audience yes yeah very popular question she notices no one is really wearing the love so why is it so dangerous to have to be handling that glass now tom is wearing gloves on his right hand because he has tools in his hands and he's working sculpturally so he's getting really close to all of that heat so yes a nice torch will help our nice glove will help protect him from that heat but if he tried to pick up that pipe and turn it the dexterity would be taken away with that glove so typically you do not see glass workers wearing gloves if they are the one handling the pipe unless it's a very thin like grippy gloves just to help them turn if it's really really big so you just learn to touch it in the right place and to not touch it where it's hot that's really what it comes down to so yes those poles are made of metal yes they do get hot but they're stainless steel so they dissipate their heat a lot better than say a copper pipe would but yes it's a delicate balance and sometimes learning the hard way where to touch and where not to touch on a cane all right now we're getting more of our complicated parts put together this is where all that insurance policy needs to start coming into play we're using these fluffy torches to continue to keep and spot heat the very delicate areas and any appendage that sticking way out has a susceptibility to become too cold and like crack right on the surface so as this gets more complicated we're going to see more and more use of those torches just to maintain heat rather than all the spot heating the reheating chamber itself is great for giving a good general overall heat but if we leave it in there too long all those parts start moving all of them start to lose their texture and their detail and so it's a really delicate balance especially the punchy connection at the back end you can see she's kind of flashing the back of that punting you don't want the punchy to get too cold either or it could fall off that funky so torching the punny is really important when you have a big piece like this that is pretty much a wall that's blocking that punty from the heat when you go in so they'll be doing a lot of that heat Oh we've got a young lady here who's been counting eyeballs and she says she only sees how many ten so she's wondering where the other eleven are well I'll tell you there's still parts to be put onto this piece so I think that there's probably still quite a few of them in our pickup oven waiting to be put on to the piece as you can see our bird doesn't have a head yet so there's at least two eyes there where the rest of them are we'll have to see together because I'm not sure where all they're gonna be hidin either but yes we're gonna be accumulating 21 eyes on this piece in its completion some of them I think are the tires and there's a couple on the side of the the bird here we've got a great picture of the image that we're working from so there's two there they have the camera on it actually but I'll pull it out of your way that's all right we'll pull it out of your way here so maybe maybe you can help count them and see if you can figure out where where that are missing from three four yeah that's right now that some of the front some at the back of the car on the four tires there's two on the side of the birds there's some flowers at the top of the bird there's two eyes for the bird itself two flowers on the back of the bird yeah two three flowers that's still yet to be have to be are trees that are yet to be attached and even one hidden over there yeah so that's where they're all at they're still yet to come we got a lot of parts yet to come in but that's very observant thank you so much yeah so there's the question if they get tired can they take a break or as you really have to finish assembling the piece in its entirety now as you can see we've got lots of components all those components are in that oven saying stay for safe warm and happy so in theory we could take this piece break it off put it into an oven let it rest go take a break and come back but heating up an entire piece with all those complicated pieces runs a higher risk that's one of the reasons why he has made smaller components that are now being assembled together because when you go to reheat everything together that means that it's all the same temperature so when as soon as you go to flash the smallest details will start to melt first while the bigger details take a while to recover that heat where if you can start with it all on the pipe and keep everything warm then you're going to have more of a core heat in that piece and working from the inside out so in theory yes we could but but yeah but at this point we wouldn't you know yeah so who's going to continue to build this piece bit by bit and if they're tired tough nooky so it's just part of glassblowing you just got to finish what you start and keep toughing it out they've actually been working really hard over the last couple days and I'm sure this evening though they will all have a great celebratory relaxation after such an adventure here at the Corning Museum of Glass for the last couple days so anyone who's joined us late in the process here this is Tom Moore from Australia he is our visiting artist this evening really coming together with an amazing amazing piece he's brought very skilled and talented team with him this evening I've got Sarah Betty Jonathan and David working on helping put this whole piece together and I think I didn't the image so what started pulling a spout at the top of this and I believe that is just going to be the opening at the top of that vessel right yeah he gave me a sure why not shrug but all of these this this particular piece is influenced by a lot of the trick glasses that you'll see examples of in our collection but you can also see them in a lot of different museums and they were done at a couple different times in history but one of the fun things about them is that they're very sculptural they look very sculpture a lot of times they're based on animals and such but there's usually a puzzle it's basically a puzzle you've got to figure out how to drink out of this vessel but there might be a hole in one place and a valve and another and I like a tube in another place so you might have to like stop up one area with a finger and then pour something in the other direction there's always this challenge of figuring out how to get the material or the liquid to flow through this vessel properly and so on as he's building this a lot of these parts are somewhat Hollow I know the top section has a very distinct trick glass approach this vest the bird itself is hollow so you could also put liquid through there poking holes in a lot of different places but this is kind of a long traditional form those trick glasses and probably the most common version of that that you might be familiar with is the German boot so you have to drink a certain way and flip the boot in a certain time otherwise the bubble will form and sploosh glass or Boosh beer all over you so all of those are built into the design of the piece kind of assembling it to be a trick now one of the things about working in this style with this hot glass is unfortunately we don't really get a good look at the colors involved in this piece this has a full rainbow of colors added on to all those different canes all the different lines all the little eyeballs but none of them are gonna really look like themselves while the glass is hot as you can see from the clear glass that we pull from our furnace it reflects the high temperatures of that glass and glows bright orange and colors also react to heat in a similar fashion sometimes they'll glow in a very unfamiliar color reflecting that key energy but also they just sort of look different when they're hot so greens or blues sometimes look green and reds will end up looking brown oranges will look red so it really depends on the color so we do highly encourage everyone to check it out online the images of this when it's complete to see all these beautiful colors that were kind of doling out tonight when they're when the glass is hot will also of course encourage anyone who's out there to come and visit us here at the corning museum of glass we have some really exciting things happening here this summer I can't believe it's August already we're already well into the summer and coming in to the second half of summer we got some special demos happening here at the Museum this summer we've got our courtyard stages open and doing three very special demos one called bubble heads which is a great sculptural approach where you our guests get to help us design little characters out of glass so if you are inspired by Tom's work here today and really want to be part of creating fun and exciting things out of glass you can visit our courtyard stage for not only the bubble heads but also our you design it program this is something we've done here at the Museum for years and this summer both the hot shop outside the courtyard stage in our flame working station and the innovations area are doing these you design it's where when you come to visit you can do an illustration and something that you'd love to see made out of glass and then we choose one of those illustrations to make an object every single day so we're making at least two of those to the everyday one in the outside shop and one in the inside flame working shop we also have our new glass now exhibition that is been up and running for a few months now showing you new and exciting ways of looking at glass as a material anyone here taking a chance to see that show today fantastic well if you haven't don't worry that's up there's plenty of time left you can go up into the contemporary wing and take a look at that exhibition you can also find a lot of images of that online as well of course if you are joining us from far and wide check out the social media there's been a lot of coverage for that particular exhibition but really forming glass just like Tom here really looking at tradition and this traditional material but taking it into new and exciting places making a wide variety of creative approaches to glass making so there we go the top of our bird head again a really great demonstration of understanding how glass moves and being able to set up very specific situations to get that beak to pull out as it was or at least the contact tip of the beak I think you might have additional class that's added to that yes in the image there's a really long black beak that's going to be added but he still needed to create the foundation for that Kayla's right on the visuals there for the image thank you so much for that so it looks like he's separating that out into two little sections I personally really do love working glass sculpturally as well so it's always fun to have artists come and do demonstrations because you can watch how they approach that material and pick up little little pro tips little tweaks to design I'm always learning something new every time I work with glass and every time I watch someone else work with glass most of the folks on the floor here I've worked with either University or public access studios and public access to use especially are really fantastic that's a great opportunity for anyone who's interested in working with glass to take an opportunity to take a class take a workshop of course we have a full range of opportunities here at our Museum the Corning Museum of Glass but as they mentioned we've got folks from Pittsburg glass Center from the Chrysler Museum from the jam factory they're in Australia all of those are going to offer opportunities for people to have access to this wonderful material and try it out and really glass making takes years of dedication to make this kind of professional level but you can make some really fun and exciting things in just a short amount of time especially taking workshops with other skilled artists to help you in some of those tricky parts like gathering what are we making here oh is this the beak nice so this wasn't a part that was made already he's developing that beak nice and hot so a bit of dirt glass looks like we're going for that one again now we do have little chips of broken glass we call frit that's in the little Bowl here on the table and I'm glad they're making some of these components in front of you folks that you can see how this kind of stuff comes together most of these lines and things that you see were made with solid colored colored glass but a lot of these little components you don't want to use solid glass color you just coat the surface of the clear with little chips of broken colored glass so then they give the illusion of being a solid object and so adding a little bit to the surface it's made of glass up melton very easily and I think that's probably a black that they use but it's a little hard for me to tell from here but all of the different colors come from the addition of metallic oxides into those raw materials of glass so black glass is actually a very dark purple glass using manganese how much did the raw materials cost you know I actually haven't had to buy any of those raw materials lately but I will tell you one thing that when you're looking at glass color versus clear glass there's a significant difference in price so the clear glass you're either going to get what's called batch or you're going to get colored batch is all those raw materials the silica the soda ash the limestone the other little bits and pieces that make it the kind of glass that it is and when you're buying batch that you're you have to also melt that in your furnace and then use more gas and more time to melt that than if you get cullet which is premade glass that you're melting down so the cost per pound it really doesn't account for the cost of energy it takes to melt that glass look at that beautiful job on the beak they're very nice but to order clear glass you're looking at a few dollars a pound depending on the glass but when you start looking at the colored glass you're looking at metallic oxides and compounds so if I'm looking at green glass that's iron added into it so that's fairly inexpensive but that's I would say in a range of twenty to thirty dollars a kilo for kind of lower in green and then you look at the pink glass pink glass uses gold chloride so those are getting up to like seventy dollars a kilo for the pink glass so depending on the metals depending on the materials depending on what form you're buying it in we buy all of our color pre-made and it comes either in solid bar form or you can get it in like pea gravel down to small little chunks down to powder so you pay a premium for powder because they have to further crush it where the bigger chunks they're a little cheaper so there's also a premium on the version of glass that you get as well all right so he set that up beautifully to contact the two sides of that peak pulled it out into a nice tall taper but now it looks like he's gonna cut it down just a little bit more to refine that peak the tip of the beef just a little bit this is where I think some of the challenges in sculpture really comes in because once you've removed a certain amount of glass it's hard to put it back without it being lumpy and if you've heated a glass and tried to give it this beautiful transition you saw how evenly it pulled out into that tall piece by reheating that glass you're really creating unevenness and so it's really difficult to get a refinement of that peak without getting almost like two angles going in that peak so this really shows his experience as a glass maker I think they said 18 years of glass making experience to really see and understand how to let that glass heat and move and to get those final shapes that you're looking for it's continued flash heating of the piece of course is very necessary to keep the balance of temperatures we also have different doors on that furnace we're using all gas fired equipment here on the amphitheater stage but you can also work with electric equipment there's that tricky move and using the cane as a little punty to grab those little pieces out of the pickup box and sticking out all right to the side of that head but we have different door sizes on our furnace as well I can already see the glow of the furnace is a little bit less than it was when we started so you're constantly kind of losing heat in that equipment as you're working and especially as you open and close all those doors so Benjamin is keeping a quick eye on the doors that are making sure that they stay closed as much as possible to conserve some of that temperature there's always questions about well how long do you know or how do you know how long to heat a piece or to not heat a piece and really that comes through years of experience because as you can see the temperature of the furnace changes throughout the course of a working of a piece and so your sense of timing also has to shift in conjunction with that change in temperature and different glasses act differently in the heat soft colors like dark blacks and blues those are going to keep their heat and soften up really quickly learn light colors like the the white and that bird and some other of the paler colors those are going to be a little more stiff so even the temperatures between those two can be different so you just have to really have a basic understanding through experience and all of us here all the glass workers here have probably broken more glass and we'd like to talk about in that pursuit of learning that sense of timing but you generally get a sixth sense you just start getting us twitch that makes you feel like you've just been out of heat too long and there's only so much a torch or other tools can help you acclimate it you really have to keep that core heat going oh you got a question sorry all right so we had a question here do we put silica in our furnace so here at the Corning Museum of Glass we don't use batch we actually use cullet so collet is already pre melted glass and those of you that are here in-house I can show you this visual but this is what our glass looks like little chunks so the manufacturer takes the raw materials of glass this silica and soda ash and limestone and melt it for us and then give us these little chips and when you're working with the batch itself it takes longer to get it to heat and melt and turn into glass and refine it can take almost 24 hours to get a really nice glass to form out of that and it takes higher temperatures and longer time so it's a little bit more expensive to melt that glass from that raw material but it also is a powder and powders silica in particular can be hazardous to your health do you need to make sure you protect yourself with proper PPE and everything so we end up getting that pre melted glass also for safety so it makes it a lot easier for us to use but but yes ours is filled with the little chips and any of the clear recycling you can see Michael just grabbed a little chunk of clear glass that had been cut free from the thing and he put it into the bucket there by the furnace so all of that clear glass that's kept clean can be put back into our furnace as well so we recycle as much glass as possible to again try to reuse as much of that material as possible glass in theory is infinitely remelt able as long as it's compatible with itself different formulas will of course all melt but they may not shrink at the same rate as they cool so you have to separate very specific glass formulas and melt those together rather than mix-and-match a bunch of random types of glass yeah alright so adding some extra little bits I think some of these are going to be anchor points for additional bits of decoration that are still yet in our oven waiting to be added to the piece I'm getting a nod that that's correct yep I think I saw there's like three trees coming out of the sack so this must be the foundation for those trees oh it's the handle is all perfect perfect so every single bit of glass that's put on to this piece is well thought out you can see from the illustration we've got a game plan but even the bits themselves we call that bit working when you're taking gobs of glass and delivering it to the gaffer to make additions but every little bit of glass has to be shaped a certain way and cooled a certain way heated a certain way all of these perfect conditions set up in that little blob of glass to get it to do what you want once it's on the piece and even getting down to the point of which tool to choose because you can see there's lots of toys and tools on the bench to play with but you also need to make sure that that you are put using the appropriate tool to cut that glass they're just shielding the piece from splattering water right now they're just cooling that pipe to make it a little easier for him to hold on to it those pipes do end up getting pretty hot especially after working on a piece for such amount of time and reheating in that furnace and everything those pipes do get pretty warm and the closer he can hold to the piece the more ergonomic it is so you want to be able to keep that pipe nice and cool so we got a really nice pipe cooler here to help it out but even a little splash of water or a drip of sweat can cause a crack to form so you got to be really careful about not letting anything fall on the piece but as he's cutting all of these bits free we've got two basic forms of tools I'll grab a few so we can talk a little bit about tools so looks like we're adding some little dots these are just using those same little rods that he could use for a cane or Marini and just fun heating little teeny dots as decorational on that form but we've got two main categories of sheers that we can use generally we have straight shears or diamond sheers straight shears come in different sizes and shapes if I'm making really delicate sculpture I might want really long thin blades that I can get into tight little spots if I have big glass to cut I'm gonna choose those bigger heavier glass tools but as I cut that glass if I cut a bit across it I'm gonna flatten it as I cut it so it's gonna turn into a square and it bit if I can't add an angle I'm gonna create a point out of that same bit and then that little point can be pulled even further now it does leave a cold chill mark along the sheared area of that glass so I have to think ahead on what my final shape I want it to be so you can kind of predict if I pull if I cut up I make it really pointy if I cut down I can compress the glass as I work so a lot of details even into the kind of shear that you use in that detail now the diamond sheers these are not made of diamond they get their name from that diamond shape in the center and is it very unique to I think only to glass make I don't think I've ever seen a pair of round scissors like this but as you narrow down on that glass it's catching it from all sides and creating a round bit so if you're cutting around a piece of glass and you want to keep it around you're gonna choose those diamond sheers to help that happen but anytime you touching metal to glass it chills the glass so that creates a certain lump do you have to plan ahead for all those little contingencies there's also a little holding spot on the tip of these diamond sheers so we can use these to grab hold of pipes and move things around as well it's at a tiny little bottle I see all right so our bird is getting a bit of beverage here well drinking and driving it looks so a tiny little vessel put right on to the roof of the car and these are all things that you would torch work yesterday right oh you made that at the glory hole oh man okay too hard it's too tiny just not very good flame worker all right well to each his own that's Lily you look like a skilled furniture worker so absolutely you got her a lot of really nice parts but he said he tried to make this on the torch didn't really work out so he worked it on the furnace and to make a tiny bottle like that in the furnace is actually quite difficult because as you can see those reheating chambers are pretty broad heat so I know when I was a beginner and I started out I always thought well if I make something tiny it'll be easier I can carry it around easier it's a little easier control that is definitely not true you work super tiny than your tolerances of where those heat zones are are compressed into such a small area it's really hard to design all right so Thomas said that he actually does a lot of torturing a lot of these little components that you see we're actually done in the flame he does a lot of solid working with flame working but he says that whenever it goes approaches hollow work generally he gravitates towards the blowpipe and to the furnace and to the liquid glass torch working usually is tubes and rods introduced into that flame to create objects and it's it's somewhat rare to find an artist who is an expert in both fields generally people will focus in one area versus another obviously he's a very diversified glass maker and knows how to work on both but we all end up gravitating to where our comfort level is in making pieces so he says I really love whenever I'm working hollow I gravitate right towards the furnace using small pipes and make really beautiful things using that hollow glass now we were talking a little bit earlier about all these grabbers that are used this looks almost like medical Cheadle's all right six hours on eBay free delivery everybody's gonna own their own pair of Cheetos now cheeto forceps okay yeah they do look like medical tools again again looking from the creative perspective when looking at objects you can acclimate them into any number of applications so I think having that flexibility to really look past a certain function especially in glass making if you always grab it to it towards glass only being used in a certain way you're never really gonna push forward in that creativity so stepping outside of that understood norm and approaching in new ways you can find new use put a bird on it he says so those are some great songs to grab hold of all these little teeny tiny pieces I think that is one of the challenges too you can make all the little amazing parts in the world but if you can't pick them up and put them on to the piece it's not gonna really help you but believe this is another little bird but look at all the detail and all of these little components again each one of these little pieces were either a piece of cane that had to be pulled and then chopped up and then picked up and put into the heat and reformed into all the textures and the designs and the shapes that you see so hours and hours and hours of work coming together to make this Tom Moore masterpiece also see they are keeping their picture down there there illustration for reference especially with so many different parts and pieces there it really helps to have a map to figure out what's the next step what's the next part that you're gonna grab and the sequence of this assemblage is also really important because if you start putting on the little details and then go for the big details you're gonna end up losing all your little details so you're kind of building it from the broad strokes down to the small strokes now you might notice as well that he's been actually warming up those Cheadle's there before he grabs hold of glass when you're working with vessels or objects or little pieces out of that pickup box oh just like a tiny bit of water can cause thermal shock or a tiny bit of sweat a little cold steel can be the disaster of a piece so making sure those tongs are warmed up so they're not shocking those pieces they may hold together they may not fall apart but it'll set a little kind of memory into that piece and that might crack at a later time what because of that little stress all this detail work is one of the things that I find the most amazing about his work tom has put a lot of thought into all of this character and all these different little components but when you start to add all these little details that add so much language into the communication that you're really trying to express creatively 7:45 oh no nothing like working under a time limit [Music] it's always tricky making big pieces like this because you again have a theory on how long it will take to assemblage but actually put things together there's a lot of factors that come into it you know maybe you needed to take that extra heat to make sure that one part of it is hot enough or maybe you need to take a little time to reassess a particular component there were spot heating some of the little tree flowers that go under the top so we're not trying to rush anybody but I do want to let you know that when the museum closes at 8 o'clock you're welcome to hang out and continue to watch but we'll have to exit out this one particular area so if there's any other thing in the museum that you wanted to see now is your chance because we're going to be filtering you out only in this lower level at 8 o'clock or act whenever he finishes this piece if it goes past 8 o'clock but we just want to warn you for that but definitely hang out and keep watching as we were finishing up our piece here so this is why this is really coming down to some of those final details all those little pieces you can see the glow from that last contact joint that'll keep its heat for a little while so even as it's being reheated it's a it's a delicate balance turning the piece making sure those that last little bit doesn't somehow fall over because it's still really hot so the more bits and pieces that are added the more complicated Jonathan's job gets as this piece is being assembled now I do notice that a lot of the pieces are still a little flexible so he's being really smart keeping it just a little bit hot so that there's just a little bit movement of movement in that piece [Music] and I know I mentioned this earlier but I really I really love that there's so much solid clear glass and this car because one of the things that's really fun about using color in glass and using thick glass is the way that of course light transmits through it but when you have thick glass it actually amplifies things makes it look bigger so having all these little stripes on the underbelly of that car but we don't really look at the car from the underneath we're looking at it from the topside and so all this thick glass is amplifying those little stripes and making them seem larger-than-life on the inside and reflecting color up through the entire piece because of those reflective qualities so it's a really interesting approach to technique of glass to decide whether the color is gonna be on the inside or the outside of a thick piece the way that you stack things really makes a difference you got transparent glass you have opaque glass and as you marry those on top of each other you get illusions of third colors because glass doesn't really mix together like paint but it will mix optically so if you're putting two transparent colors over top of each other you're gonna get a third transparent color but if you put a transparent over an opaque sometimes that underlying opaque say if it's white then it can make that transparent pop even more so than what it would on its own so a lot of that thought process goes into the design of work and I think it's something that's very unique to glass as well because most things in life aren't transparent so if you're looking at ceramics you know you're really looking at color on the surface of glass or of on the ceramic and so you have that extra dimension to play with when you're looking at designing work out of glass even down to define the finite little details like the wings or the little petals of the flowers I can see that he's using multiple colors to create that variegation to create that depth in the work and all of that comes together to be a very kind of playful and thoughtful approach to color and design any other questions or curiosities that you folks have with us yes sir do we keep our furnaces on at night or turn them off so the reheating chambers that were working out of sorry about that and as a request for some additional grabbers so our furnaces the the one that holds the glass does need to be kept hot all the time it takes almost a week to get a furnace up to temperature full of glass and ready to go and if it were to crash as that glass cools if it was full of glass that glass would harden and shrink and start to pull apart the furnace itself so it's it's very important to not give it a lot of up and down swing when it has all that glass now the the reading chambers there's no glass inside of there so those get shut off every night and we it only takes about an hour to two hours to bring them back to temperature in the morning yeah this furnace was turned on in 2015 when we opened this wing and has not been turned off since so they will last anywhere from 5 to 15 years depending on the type of furnace but the glass is very corrosive so the second you flip on that switch and you turn on that fire you start melting glass in it it starts eating itself so the glass is melting away the crucible inside that holds all of that glass the sill is starting to be eaten away so eventually we will need to turn it off to do repairs replace that inner liner that holds all the glass maybe rebuild the sill a little bit but for now it's holding like a champ so you won't I don't foresee that being anytime soon yeah good question oh good so we found the grabbers these are another kind of Augmented tool that become very popular for glass makers they're actually like a pair of kitchen tongs and then they add a little bent section to the tip to create a three-prong grabber I think these are actually are these I believe I believe these are Jason Johnson tongs so I want to give a shout out to Jason Johnson one of the amazing glass worker and a tool maker out in Seattle area in the Upstate Washington but he makes a lot of really unique tools because him and Karen won break they work together to making a lot of really amazing glass sculptural things and again with you don't have the tools to make what you want you make your own tools and so he has developed a whole line of very unique pieces our tools to be able to make sculpture with so here we go that top section of the trick top or the trick Glink drinking glass if you remember some of the images that we saw earlier in the program there you can see some of the connections between this little addition and some of those historically referenced pieces that inspire Tom and his work beautiful job yeah yeah we give a big round of applause coming together coming together fantastic now this is all clear glass city's added but it still has a couple little connections and I believe our little girl who is counting eyeballs has left but hopefully by the end of this piece we can count all 21 I ball on there and this Cup definitely has a little eyeball on it as well I'm sorry you know I'm sorry with all the torches the cooling down process yes absolutely so as glass cools it shrinks so you need to let it shrink evenly and under controlled conditions now that shrinking process it depends on the type of glass that it is ours is a soda-lime glass so it has a pretty big expansion contraction if you're looking at borosilicate glass it is formulated to not have that big expansion contraction so you can throw a Bunsen burner on it or you can throw it from your oven to your refrigerator and it won't crack so for this glass it does need to be cooled slowly so we have boxes on both sides of the stage these are called annealing ovens and to anneal glass you cool it slow enough so that it's little parts it's big parts that spin it's thick it's outside it's inside all cool and shrink at the same rate that way it avoids that stress and cracks so and that rate of cooling is based on the thickness of the glass not the size of the glass so if we made a big bubble about Tom's size but it was Hollow it would cool much faster than if we made something solid like his foot or his hand or any other no thanks solid chunk so we need to make sure to calculate the thickness of the work when we plan how long we take to cool it and we also need to calculate maybe how complicated a piece is when you're looking at certain shapes certain connections all of those will also automatically be more stress inducing than others and so a very complicated piece like this with all these different parts and connections will give it extra time not only based on the thickest part but just to allow it to cool and hopefully survive that strength so I'm guessing this one will be at least a 24-hour cycle if not longer but he hasn't told us how long it's gonna be cooling yet so I'll have to answer that question after we put it away in our oven most of the average pieces that you see down here on the stage all of our daily demonstration programs those are generally an overnight process you can come back the next day and see one of the objects that we've seen made as I said this will probably be a day or two before we come in get it out and also we will document it I will take pictures we'll put it on to our social media onto our website so you'll be able to see this final piece and it's glorious colors once it's down to room temperature in a few days also keep an eye on that social media of course we've got a few more visiting artists and live streams coming up on those Thursday evenings at 6:00 the studio every Wednesday Wednesday afternoon also does live streaming so you can watch glassblowing and glass forming torch work all sort of different kinds of demonstrations throughout the summer there and then we archive them eventually all on our YouTube channel so if you have a particular artist that you didn't get a chance to see or if you have a particular technique you want to check out you can reference that entire collection on the website or on our YouTube channel as well if Corning's known for anything else it's good social media for sure we try to document everything that's happening here and make sure that everyone gets an opportunity to really be a part of the exciting things that are happening because of course there are so many exciting things happening at the Corning Museum of Glass what's that the time is 7:59 how's your time going you're pretty close well take your time do what needs to be done no need to rush and like I said those of you are sitting here don't worry you can stay with us to watch the rest of this show our rest of the assemblage and of course online you're just nice and comfy wherever you're sitting so hopefully you've made yourself comfortable and you can continue to watch as well but we won't kick anybody out eight o'clock we just can't let you go anywhere else in the museum's we'll just file you out accordingly to make sure you can visit we're gonna put it in this lower oven here and we have a piece of fiber fracks in there ready for you well the base is a cone shell all right so a little discussion on how this piece is going to be loaded into the oven we really want to make sure that there's enough space so we're gonna put a couple kiln shelves in there and that way it can sit on these kiln shelves and give the wheels a nice steady place to sit with a little space to make sure that the punty doesn't keep it from sitting flat the bottom of this piece that punny connection that is in on that piece will be severed but it'll leave a chunk of glass this is another one of those insurance policies that we built into the piece instead of breaking the connection at the piece and running the risk of breaking into the piece itself there's a jack line or a squeeze line put in between about halfway in that punny so when we go to break it free there'll be a little chunk left and that'll be cold worked off later so that is just another way of making sure that the piece is kept as one piece and not losing any of that beautiful color that's on the bottom of the vessel I think we are coming in on some final moments so I just want to give another shout out to all of our team here tonight we've got of course Sarah bonds been helping out tonight with a lot of hearts components torch work David King as well he's got the torch right now helping maintain Jonathan Bulevar has been doing a lot of the heating here tonight and Betty Gowen really keeping an eye on the back end of the pipe all the parts and components keeping the glue of everything going and flowing Benjamin here is our intern this summer and he's been doing a fantastic job here at the SEMA throughout the summer he'll be heading back to Detroit here soon he's been Manning the doors and helping keep things together Michael beams getting all dressed up in the magic suit here to help protect him from the intense heat of holding this piece and loading it into the oven as well we also have the amazing visual team here that's working all the cameras on Brad is on camera Amanda's been answering all your questions online and is of course going to be taking pictures and showing you all this things on the social media so she is responsible for all of those fantastic things you're seeing online Kayla's been Manning the cameras upstairs doing a great job showing you all the unique views of this wonderful piece as it comes together and of course the one in the only Tom mower here leading the team making this beautiful piece so excited to have him with us here this week making all the parts and pieces for this final assemblage check out his work online of course she is in Australia I think he's traveling a bit this summer here in the United States so you might be able to catch up with him here but we're really excited to have him here for a couple of days with us so he's kind of chopping away a little bit at that connection making sure that there's a weak spot glass breaks wherever it is the weakness we always put in all of these constrictions these weaknesses to make sure that's where the glass breaks continuing to torch balancing out those temperatures don't want any one little part to get too cold like I said that'd be some really fun visuals on the inside of that reheating chamber throughout this process is an amazing amazing piece I can't wait to see this when it's all cold in its brilliant colors couple final tweaks it's no need to put it away until it's perfect you want to make sure everything's in the right piece and right in the right place and also the right temperature if anything's too hot and we go to put it away it could shift a little bit you always want to make sure that your work is loaded away into the oven at a temperature where it's not moving around so you get out what you put in [Music] there we get our final look a little discussion there and making sure he's got a good hold on it there we go let's go up quick now more the team beautiful job away in the oven oh just tall enough and it sits on those wheels fantastic I want to thank everyone for tuning in online and joining us here in house this is a really exciting piece keep an eye on that social media to see the final look of that piece but thank you so much Tom and all the team [Music]

Channel: Corning Museum of Glass

Views: 6,633

Rating: 4.0370369 out of 5

Keywords: Corning Museum of Glass, glass, glassmaking, glassblowing, guest artist, Tom Moore, glass sculpture

Id: BEtUqsPzRJk

Length: 128min 55sec (7735 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 23 2019