GLASS BLOWING
Glass blowing is the process of forming glass into useful or sculptural shapes while the glass is in a molten, semi-liquid state.
 History While the first evidence of man-made glass occurs in Mesopotamia in the Late-Third/Early-Second Millennium BCE, the actual "blowing" of glass using a tube did not occur until sometime between 27 BC and AD 14 in Syria. This advancement transformed the material's usefulness from a time-consuming process in which the medium was hot-formed around rough cores of mud and dung into a mass-producible material which could be quickly inflated into large, leakproof vessels. Glassblowing techniques spread throughout the Roman world. Venice, particularly the island of Murano, became a centre for high quality glass manufacture in the late medieval period.
 The relatively recent "studio glass movement" began in 1962 when Harvey Littleton, a ceramics professor, and Dominick Labino, a chemist and engineer, held two workshops at the Toledo Museum of Art, during which they began experimenting with melting glass in a small furnace and creating blown glass art. Thus Littleton and Labino are credited with being the first to make molten glass available to artists working in private studios. This approach to glassblowing blossomed into a worldwide movement, producing an abundance of well-known studio glass artists. Many colleges in the U.S. and around the world have now added glass programs to their art departments, in recognition of the medium as an art form, and allowing students of art to explore the medium more readily than ever before. This trend has added to the ever increasing number of studio glass artists working in the field today, and organizations like the Glass Art Society have formed to take up the work of increasing awareness of glass art and facilitating the tranfer of information and techniques among those artists working in the medium worldwide.
 Process Traditionally, glass is melted in furnaces from the raw ingredients of sand, limestone, soda, potash and other compounds. The transformation of raw materials into glass takes place well above 2000°F (1400 K); the glass is then left to "fine out" (allowing the bubbles to rise out of the mass), and then the working temperature is reduced in the furnace to around 2000°F. "Soda-lime" glass remains somewhat plastic and workable, however, as low as 1000°F.
Once a blown glass piece is completed, it must be annealed, or slowly cooled to release stress in the material. This is done in an annealing oven. |
