[sizzling]
[water pouring]
[rhythmic jazz cymbals playing]
- Glass is very elemental.
And some of the tools we use are also very elemental,
heat, water, air, gravity, centrifugal force.
A lot of people don't think of those as tools
but they are for the glass maker.
I want it to have a little life in it
from those unseen forces and from the glass itself.
I really am not trying to dominate this material,
but to pull a life out of it that's in it.
And so people can see that.
I'm Deborah Czeresko, and this is how I turn molten glass
into a sculptural vase.
My sculpting technique derives
from the basic tools of glass blowing.
I'll have the jacks, the pincers, the diamond shears,
the tagliol, the bench torch, oxy propane torch, airgun.
Sands, soda ash, and lime, and some metal oxides
for decolorant, kind of a white powdery material,
and that's what we call glass batch.
[sultry saxophone riff]
My formal inspiration for the poached egg
was what happens when you crack an egg
and put it in water.
And I love that about the poached egg series
and poached eggs themself.
They're all like wildly different.
The glass color comes in different forms,
from powder to solid rods.
Rods are just dense metal oxides the color of the glass
that I break little pieces off of,
and then heat to about a thousand degrees.
So using that solid rod called the punty,
I gather my first gather.
That is the size of the baseball about now.
I wait and let it cool down so it's not moving,
and it can support more glass.
So I gotta take a couple of gathers.
[jazzy percussive music]
- [Ali] You wanna use the funky water
or the bigger one?
- Funky.
That tool that I'm holding is called a wooden block
and it's made out of a hardwood,
typically something like cherry wood,
and it's lathed out by a woodworker
so there's different sizes.
As you gather glass,
obviously it's getting bigger and bigger.
You're gonna need the different sizes.
So now we're gonna go in the yellow.
Then I'm gonna roll the hot gooey glass
into the room temperature powder.
The powder is called Frit.
Glass frit is broken up pieces of glass
that are densely impregnated
with metal oxides so that they can be blown up
and still appear colorful.
Corn yellow it's called.
That's the color I use, even though it's yolk yellow to me.
But it picks up really easily because it's such a fine frit.
And I do that like four times,
I want a dense coating.
I want this to be a really rich fatty yolk
cause I know I'm gonna be torching this thing
and I don't wanna distort the color.
This is supposed to be very central piece,
very tempting, very food oriented.
So it's gotta be appetizing to look at.
So I put this beautiful thin layer of clear over it.
I gather clear, but a lot gets on there
so I strip off a lot of the clear.
[jazzy music]
Using the tools like the diamond shears,
I pull off as much clear as I possibly can.
It gives us this really glossy gel look on the outside
of the yolk and then form that into kind of a half sphere.
And then that piece goes in the garage.
It sits in there at about 920 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's very fragile, it can easily crack.
I'll get like no time to work with it.
[sultry saxophone riff]
Next we're going to make the egg white.
To start the process, I grab my blow pipe
and I gather the molten glass out of the furnace
on the head of the blow pipe,
maybe two inches up the blow pipe.
And then I'll form it with the wind block
so that when you blow into it,
the bubble doesn't inflate asymmetrically.
And I cap it in there and it expands
and I get an inflated bubble.
[sultry saxophone riff]
So I choose this opal white color.
and that's heated,
formed into like a round ball,
and then dropped over my base.
Now I have to use my either tagliol or my Marver
to coax that white glass over the initial bubble.
When I'm putting the tagliol in the wax, I'm lubricating it.
Sometimes I want the tool to have wax on it
and be lubricated, and sometimes I don't.
Sometimes I want friction.
So we use a steel table called a Marver.
Now this table is very important for small gathers of glass
and getting them regular.
Wet newspaper is surprisingly an effective tool
to form glass, and it works really well
because it holds moisture well.
That's about 10 sheets folded up into a square,
soak that, then we'll put it on the outside
of the molten glass and the heat on the watered pad
creates steam and cools the glass.
So instead of say metal in the case of the tagliol
we're now using a gentler approach to cooling the glass.
[soft music]
The paper is the place where we get the closest
to the glass possible and you actually can feel the glass.
My hand is part of the tool as well now.
So I can selectively squeeze in areas with my hand.
I like using the paper more than any other tool.
I feel really at one with it.
And I think it could be one of your only tools
for some pieces.
Once it's at a temperature where it's not moving,
but it still has life in it I go in back into the furnace.
I gather again.
Now, I'm gonna do this several times
to get the amount of glass I need.
[soft jazz music]
And then eventually I get to the point
where I have enough glass to make the size piece I want.
[blowing]
Next, I form it with the cork paddles.
This is a poached egg,
so it's like what the egg looks like plunging into water,
but it's artist interpretation of that.
So I imagine if I were an egg going into water
what would I look like?
It's supposed to look very fluid,
and it's frozen in a moment.
So the water freezes a poach egg up.
Okay. A little more heat.
- [Alex] Little more heat?
- Yeah.
I use the wind paddle made of cherry wood
to form a pretty big bottom
cause this is a chunky piece
and I want it to be very stable.
Now I need to unify these two components.
I need to get that yolk outta the garage.
I heat its little bottom so it's gonna be all gooey
and it's gonna stick to the white.
I also put a round spot on the white of the egg
where I'm gonna connect the two,
so these two gooey sections are gonna selectively combine.
[soft jazz music]
[blowing]
Now we have to do this thing called punty.
It's really a special moment when we punty a piece of glass
because it's like this pretty small connection point
and this big thing hanging off of it.
This is now weighing like 10 pounds at least.
And then I put a little water on the neck of the piece
I formed with the jacks previously, and then tap it.
And it just comes off.
Now I can work the top half of the piece.
And then it has to go in the box,
which is the annealer to be cooled down slowly.
After 48 hours in the annealer,
the transformation is complete.
I totally identify with glass.
I feel like glass is a very emotional material.
It's sort of an androgynous material.
I think it reflects me in my gender identity.
And I really do like to be playful and have fun.
I develop something called the buffet collection,
which was like huge vats of food that people can afford.
Less serious, more fun.
I like to confront serious issues with that playfulness
and in my functional objects and collections
I just really just like to be very playful.
And I'm not trying to do the same thing
every time I go into the hot shop.
So I choose objects that are gonna be different every time.
It's like a little odyssey, honestly.
The morning when I come in, I'm very nervous.
I'm trying to get things in place.
I'm wondering if I really know what I'm doing.
Every time, you're responding
to conditions that are different.
It's like jazz.
It's like every single gather is different.
Every time you make a mark on the glass, it's different.
I doubt myself a lot in the very beginning.
I get calmer once I touch the material
and it starts doing something.
When I start feeling more confident with the material,
I start having fun.
So now my true nature is to be playful.
And then I get to be playful with the material
instead of like worried about it.
Now I realize I can just really nail these things
and take it to a new height.
And usually by the end, I'm like in love with this thing.
And that's when it becomes very precious
and detachment has to occur
because this piece could crack.
Anything could occur.
So it's hard to fall in love with something
and be totally detached from it at the same time.
You care, but you have to understand
that it might not make it.
I'm drained at the end of the day not just from the heat
but from the mental thing I go through.
There's so many things I connect with this material
and I'm never giving it up.
I love it.
I love what it says about me.
It's fun to see yourself in a material, honestly.