I had a good talk with Amanda while she was in the studio about kiln glass and hot glass. It's interesting, because I like to blow glass, and I'm not bad at it. I could practice more and I'd be better, of course, but I've had about three years of experience blowing, and I experimented a lot in that time with different techniques. That said, I am just not attracted to the aesthetic of the work I make it in the hot shop, and I don't want to be required to have a relationship with a hot shop in order to make my work in the future. If I get to have access to one from time to time, that could be fun, but I don't want to be dependant on it. Also, I like the sharp lines of cut and kiln glass. But, still people keep telling me that I "could do that in the hotshop" and, in many situations, it's true.
Amanda's work is sort of similar, she goes through a long process in the kiln to do something that could ostensibly be done in the hot shop. We were talking about this because the black cameras reference incalmo, a glass blowing technique where two different coloured cups are fused together at the lip into one vessel that has two (or more) colours, separated by straight bands. I like it in blown glass, but the cast, glued and cut glass is just so sharp and direct. I am often told that what I'm doing could be done through hotshop processes, which is sort of true. Yes, I could make heavy clear and black incalmo, but there would be so many problems with them. These are small... about 10 cm diameter. The clear part is solid glass, and the black part is hollow. I love the weight of them. Black is softer than clear, and the best way to put the lens in would be to make it fit into the "neck" of the vessel (which is a thing I've been thinking about for these, it could be interesting to make vessels where the stopper was the lens). So, with heavy clear away from the pipe and soft black near the pipe, keeping control of these in the hot shop would be difficult, they could be done the other way around, keeping the clear heavy side near the iron, but even then, the line definition that I get in the cut and glued version would be lost.
