Wisconsin Life

In elementary school we're introduced to solids and liquids and gases, and we understand those things or how to interact with them. But glass has this really like, alien behavior of like, being amorphous. How do you interact with something that's changing its behavior as you work with it? It's just really captivating to me. Now try the blades vertical and spread them to shape that shoulder. Yes! More vertical. I teach at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and I teach glass in the Art Department.

clank, plink, plink as glass bounces

It's more exciting when it crashes, but...

laughs

We start with a furnace. It's super-hot. It's at about 2150 Fahrenheit. And you throw in glass that we buy from a manufacturer. It melts and then you gather it out of the furnace. And it's like a viscous liquid. It's sort of like when you're trying to gather up honey. Once you have this fulcrum, you just have to do the lightest thing and it just comes up. I think what I m teaching them, it's like this act of magic to transfer that information from my body to a student's body. Like they can see me do something and they're like, "How did you do that?" But to work them through the process of learning how to do that with their own bodies is really exciting to me. Push forward to help it get shorter too. Right, now really squat it up quite a bit. We're at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Glass Lab in the Art Department. This is a really historically relevant glass program. It was founded by Harvey Littleton in 1962. He was a ceramics professor that was really interested in whether one could have an independent artist studio working with glass, because prior to that, glass really existed in factories and industry. So it was the beginning of glass being something one could study at a university, as well as something an individual artist could practice on their own. A lot of people get bit by the glass bug, is how people refer to it. Once you get into it, you kind of just don't stop. My artwork, it's just my filter on the world. This is "Alphabit". It's modeled after a letterpress type cabinet. Each of these pieces is an individual cross-section of a solid tube of glass. I'm going to estimate just under 10,000 little pieces of glass type in here. And it's kind of in response to our relationship to our phones. We're constantly connected to them. So I'm taking the material from the smart phone, the glass, and trying to bring it back to our former relationship with physical typography. I make a lot of glass work that references language because my grandmother raised me and she only spoke Chinese. And so I played translator a lot. And I was always moving between the English-speaking world and the Chinese-speaking world. That experience of being bilingual has definitely influenced my outlook as an artist and my interest as an artist as well. I really like working in glass. To ask my body to interact with this changing state of matter is something that continually captivates me. My art is something that feels like it s completely mine. It feels really authentic. It feels like no one else can be doing that work but me.