My first semester concluded with an array of body parts—spines, rib cages, lungs, a heart, marionette hands and feet, and several iterations of The Shape of Fear. As I moved into the winter term, I started working with two assistants. I selected students in their first and second years of undergrad to work with whose early work in the hotshop and whose passion for glass impressed me. I had never worked with an assistant before and have discovered that while worth climbing the learning curve, it brings its own set of challenges. Working on developing a piece is hard. Learning to communicate about a piece as I develop it is harder. Finding myself in the middle of that and needing to teach technical skills on the fly, that I have never instructed, while still learning how my assistants learn… is exhausting. Rewarding, and worth it, but I have a whole new appreciation for teachers, especially those who teach intense studio crafts like glass blowing!
I quickly learned that I needed to work on a separate skill set and projects with each assistant to keep in my brain what each of them had learned. Perhaps the bigger challenge has been in beginning to think through works that depend on extra hands. Despite watching endless hours of other gaffers working with assistants, I have found it difficult to expand my vocabulary of possibility to extend beyond my own body. How do I learn to think with my hands and someone else’s hands? I think that it is like learning to dance—a thing I have never done—in that it requires learning to move together, anticipate one another, almost breathe together, as a sort of a means of becoming a multicellular organism. I have worked as an assistant, which I suppose is analogous to learning as a dance partner to follow a partner’s lead. Now I am trying to learn how to lead, learning what I need to communicate in order to facilitate each of us landing in the right place at the right time with the right piece of hot glass or tools, learning to trust that together we can create something greater than the sum of our parts.
Two assistants, two streams of skills and thoughts, developing two divergent pieces while exploring radically different aspects of glass (while simultaneously beginning to percolate on and pursue the parts I need to make for the marionette and phoenix projects on my precious few hours working solo in the shop). With C, I am researching methods of creating a reliquary for my leg. Working with clear glass, blown relatively thin, I am looking to create a piece that reflects the experience of amputation and prosthesis as two interlocking bubbles, each of which is then opened into a low, wide, smoothly rounded bowl form. The component that references what remains of my leg begins as a bubble with the end amputated. Without the prosthetic part it becomes an open bottomed bowl, unable to hold anything while still clearly maintaining the shape of a bowl—as my leg retains its legness without being able to hold me up unassisted.
The prosthetic part of the reliquary object is similarly shaped, beginning as a wide bubble to be fitted to the shape of the opening of the Leg-bowl. Joining an opened bubble to a closed bubble is not something I have ever seen done, and finessing the process of creating and joining the parts while trying to explain this experimental process to C has taken a lot of trial and error. Unlike a traditional incalmo, where the edges of two open cups are joined to enclose a bubble, I am trying to join the opened lip of one bubble to the closed dome of the other. It is important to get the angle exactly correct, or the soft, hot lip buckles and stretches out of round leaving a messy seam. It is important to get it precisely centered or opening it into a bowl form goes wildly awry. Both bubbles have to be sufficiently hot to stick and to withstand the stress of the transfer. When we have gotten closest to managing all of these things, and remembered which bubble needed to be broken off its blowpipe in the transfer, we have come close to achieving the form I want. After the initial transfer of Leg-bubble onto Prosthetic-bubble I had to open the leg-bubble into the wide, low leg-bowl form.
The challenge here is that unlike a typical bowl, the interior space must accommodate the dome of the prosthetic-bubble. Once open, another transfer, this time onto a punty centered on the dome of the prosthetic-bubble in the interior-center of the leg-bowl. The leg bowl becomes a heatshield that complicates the process of keeping the punty warm enough on reheats, and I learned to have C torch the punty while I work on shaping the prosthetic-bubble into its final bowl form. In order to create a point of containment for an actual reliquary object, I plan to create a third bowl form, this one smaller, so that its open edge matches the circumference of the seam where the Leg Bowl joins to the prosthetic bowl. When fitted together, it will create a trapped airspace almost like a 3D Venn diagram—in the finished piece this will be a chamber which will contain some of the ashes of my leg.
With L, I started with solid glass objects that utilize the painterly qualities of colored glass. By layering and manipulating bits of glass over a dark blue core, we built up landscapes contained in paperweights. During the time prior to my amputation, I was so restricted by pain that I spent my days looking out my window at the birds and the mountains. The natural beauty of the landscape sustained me. I thought a lot about geologic time when moments felt eternal due to the way pain slows time. How long had these mountains stood? How had time changed them, weathered them? How did it feel to be a mountain? As we built the layers of sky and mountains, I learned to control the textures and colors, and to trust L to prepare and bring additional bits—green trails to make northern lights in the sky, deep lagoon and white to bring an icy mountain river to the scene. Each component extended the vocabulary of the piece and allowed me to capture the reverence and gratitude I have for the beauty of the mountains.
In the time just before my amputation I lived in New Mexico, before that in California, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Kentucky, Indiana, Delaware, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts. All of these landscapes have been important in different ways in the thirty years that I dealt with chronic pain, and I plan to create designs that reference each, allowing geology, nature, and memory to become droplets of beauty and endurance of the Before.