Glass flameworking

2018-06-03

An experience through glass flameworking small scale pieces. Exploring and discovering a new mode of the flow state.

Someone told me about this place that did art classes and that they had a lot of cool mediums to try. I looked it up and saw they had a one night welding class. That sounded cool. I tried it, and what an experience. The instructor showed us basic methods awnd techinques, but left it completely open as to what we wanted to do. That freedom was ..... freeing. It was an impactful experience, working creatively in a medium that was so different than I had ever been exposed to before. I was hooked, I wanted to try more things.

The next class I saw was a glass flamework bead making class. I didn't know what a glassbead was, or what flameworking was. I just knew it was affordable and a one weekend committment. Seemed fun to me!

Flameworking glass as a creative artistic medium was unlike anything I've ever experienced, ever. We know metal, if you push on metal hard enough it bends, if you heat up some welding material you can stick two pieces of metal together. Glass? Unless you've done this, you have never seen glass manipulated like this before. We see glass as solid and in one shape, brittle. If you heat it up, it gets hot. All this is to say, the first moment I saw glass heated to the point of deformation, it was amazing. This material that was solid, is now this semi solid-liquid thing, changing viscosity constantly. And we could be in control of that. I kept wanting to learn from there on.

We controlled how much heat, and thus the degree we wanted the glass to be pliable. The inherent nature of flameworking glass means it is a extremely time critical process. Let it get too hot for a second? your shape is gone and melted. Let it get too cool? it is solid and won't move, or worse, it'll crack entirely. If glass is not annealed (kept at temperature and slowly cooled over a day's time), it is likely to crack due to the outside cooling faster than the inside and creating stress(one side wants to expand or contract, while the other side does not, making the two sides pull at each other).

Due to this time criticality, glass flameworking requires being totally present in the process. I liked that. Being completely immersed in the process, effortless concentration. It just flowed.

On a cold winter day, it would be common for me to go into the studio, light the warm flame and work 4 hours straight. I'd turn off the flame and awake from a complete meditative state, it was amazing.

Aside from the aesthetic novelty of making glass objects, this medium is conducive and promotes inner attributes and experiences I've come to appreciate. Presence, flow state, creativity, feeling, its all there.