Reflections on Glass
Or what glassmaking taught me that AI never could...
I don’t know what I was expecting when I first tried glassmaking, but from the moment I gathered molten glass out of a furnace on a metal blowing iron, I fell in love with the pale fluorescent glow of glass’ heat and the hum of the furnace keeping it alive.
Glass furnaces emit a slow rumbling when the door is closed and a quiet roar when opened, revealing the still pool of glowing glass. Gathering glass is like twisting white hot honey onto a stick with swift turns of fingers. To prevent it from dropping off the iron, it has to be rotated at precisely the speed at which its viscosity succumbs to gravity. The working space is in a bench with metal arms that the blowing iron must be rolled along to shape and tool the glass, your left hand rolling, your right hand working with multiple tools in a myriad of motions. Getting there from the furnace involves moving towards the bench and then sitting the other way round within it, blowing iron reversed—all in a movement as fluid as walking. Shaping the glass with wet wooden blocks makes it sizzle with a sweet burnt smell like nothing else on earth. In the first morning light the glass’s soft orange heat seems both primordial, like the inside of the earth, and soft, like skin in the sun.
Working with hand tools on material at over 1000 degrees Celsius, and so molten that it wants to run away, one would think that glass is bating you to squeeze it, push it, yank it, bully it. But any glassblower will tell you that this is not the case—it is you that must be controlled. Your own hands must chase the material and become good enough for it. Learning these skills is like a series of tacit agreements made between fingers, mind, and hot glass: a mental map made in three dimensions between bench and body. Altogether this kind of knowledge—spatial, dexterous, corporeal, rhythmical—is a hard won negotiation between gravity acting on glass and your body’s interception of it, one that fails immediately if either party gets their way too much. The learning process, after the initial punishment of almost relentless failure, is one of reconciliation. Glass teaches patient resilience.
When I first learnt glassmaking there never seemed to be enough studio hours. In the evenings at home I would tie heavy objects to a broom and roll it up and down the arms of chair to teach my left hand the necessary crawling action for keeping control of larger pieces, all while watching Youtube videos of glassmakers I admired on repeat. This looked daft, of course, and is a little nerdish to admit, but I now realise that it was not solely the repetition of the hand motion that was important in the acquisition of the skill, but the combination of watching and doing, a process that develops into the ability to anticipate—for your body to know something before your thoughts get there. Later, working as a glassmaker’s assistant, I would stand behind the bench, organising the tools, watching the glass’s heat diminish, gauging the maker’s next step: feeling the glassmakers’ movements in my own hands just by watching. My understanding of anticipation broadened from an understanding of the requirements of the glass to the needs of the maker. This kind of collaboration required in glassblowing is so essential yet subtle that it’s hard to describe. It is borne of long hours watching someone make things until it feels as though you are doing it yourself.
Not all days are great. Quite often there’s war in your own coordination that makes the process sluggish, like tugging and pulling and scraping and banging. When it goes wrong, these sounds tell you that your approach must change almost before you can see what it is that has failed. On these days I often wonder what constitutes ‘knowledge’ of working with a material like glass. When you make something well it feels like every muscle, tendon and bone knows ahead of your thoughts what the glass needs them to do. That knowledge lives as something other than information—easy to do and hard to recall how it’s done. But the understanding required to rescue a piece going wrong is different. It’s slow and laboured, with every step having to be dragged into awareness.
Then there are those thoughts that always run ahead. With glassmaking there is always the potential to be better, faster, smoother, lighter. Your hands never quite catch up with your goals, and when they do, you find that your ideas have settled further from what’s possible. There is always a more difficult form, a shape that must be perfectly repeated, one that must be measured more precisely, weighted more carefully, touched less with the metal tools so that on completion it looks as though it gave life to itself on a steady exhale.
Glass made me want to make things and, curiously, this desire made it impossible not to see all the objects in the world as things that were made. I look at all forms of glass, from handmade drinking glasses to the latest smartphone camera lenses, as a continuity of innovation—not in separate fields of craft, art, design and the sciences.
Yesterday I went to see the glass collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, a place that I used to visit with keen frequency when I began training to be a glassmaker. Its collections of blown glass date from pre Roman times, in the first century BCE. Lined up, row upon row, with tiny labels on glass shelves and shimmering in diffused light are green and brown 2000-year-old fragile and tiny toilet pots, cinerary urns and moulded flasks, many precious enough to be buried with their owners. Next to them are second century bottles which look almost transparent, astounding when you learn that to turn the iron oxide-heavy sand into clear glass the Romans figured out that purple manganese must be added, the chemistry of which wouldn’t be explained for centuries.
When I first learnt about glass the appeal of these little objects was the way in which their forms might tell me how they were made, not, like an archaeologist, why they were made. Every decorative detail seemed as much about the joy of the movement of its making as its potential symbolic meaning or even its function. And steadily, something else happened in my mind. Objects made of glass began to bring to life dull school lessons in geography, physics, history and chemistry. What began as determination to form a blob of unwieldy hot glass span out into a fascination with prisms, the colour of light, the process of making deep sea optic cables, the chemical composition of different glasses. I now know things about the molecular structure of glass that would have bored me to tears at school, had it not been brought to life through watching glass move, from observing its strange material characteristics—its transparency, fragility, viscosity.
When I think about a material like glass I can’t separate art from science. And this isn’t just because I love the stuff. This is the deceptive irony of glass: innovations in the material made through the observations of artisans, designers, drinkers and tinkerers told us how to discover what glass is, and more than that, what the universe might be. Glass gave us modern science. We have microscopes and telescopes because we also have drinking glasses and booze bottles.
Living in a city like London, glass is everywhere, in every conceivable form. UV filtered and coated double glazed glass silently does the job of controlling the temperature of the space you inhabit while letting light in to your office. Every glass you drink from has a complex design history developed in concert with the alcohol industries throughout time. Glass made the inert beakers and test tubes that advanced modern chemistry, the telescopes that furthered physics, and enabled microscopes to teach us about the living world. Yet we only know that there was a meteor that hit the pure white sand of the Lybian desert 26 million years ago because the small piece of glass sacred enough to be mounted at the centre of King Tutankhamun’s necklace was formed by the heat of its impact. By valuing this decorative object and entombing it, the ancient Egyptians stored information for future humans about a past that they couldn’t themselves have known about. In 2013 scientists at the university of Southampton made discs from quartz glass capable of storing data for over 300 million years. Microsoft’s Project Silica has created a glass library that can store data forever. The data embedded in these little pieces of glass will survive the human race. And all of this came from heat, sand and human curiosity.
So for me, craft is not solely about hand skills any more than technology is about machine capability, or even the confluence of human minds and technical brilliance. Making things in hot glass made me value the kind of knowledge that lives in the tentative acquisition of dexterity, the kind you feel first and know later. My experience is that this kind of learning is driven from something deeper even than curiosity, perhaps more foundational. When I first lowered a blowing iron into hot glass it was as if something right down deep in every one of my cells just said YES!
I want everyone to find something that feels that way to them. I worry that for all our concentration on the future, on libraries of perfect glass to hold knowledge for eternity, we can’t store or protect the thing that can’t live as information, the key to making anything—the giddy, goofy, obsessive joy of making stuff. And I wonder if we are even human without it.