Pilchuck 2014

Sorry about the quite extreme delay on posting this! I have been pretty busy moving up to Scotland but I am finally getting settled so I thought I had better get on and post this... So I got to go to Pilchuck Glass School and take a class with the incredible Nancy Callan, I can't quite put into words how mind blowingly amazing it was... i'm going to try.

So the class was just under two weeks and there was a lot to do. There were 12 students from all over the world, all with different backgrounds and ideas, it made for a really great group.

Every day we had a two hour (ish) demo from Nancy and her three TA's, Alex Cannon, Mikey Cozza & Jason Forck, during the demo's they made every type of cane you could possibly imagine and then turned them into Nancy's beautifully thought out pieces.

The No 1 A Team - Nancy Callan, Alex Cannon, Mikey Cozza & Jason Forck

These guys were just incredible, the combined experience and skill level was amazing to behold and such a help for me to create and refine the ideas that I had. I didn't go to Pilchuck with set ideas, I wanted to see what I could learn and go from there, and boy did I learn.

Our first project was a Decanter and cup set, now I haven't been blowing glass for a while so I was skeptical about what I would be able to produce but you know what, I was pretty happy with the end result, I was playing with an existing idea of using white cane and folding it over itself during the hot process to create a layered pattern. This is the end result.

Next up we got to explore our own ideas from the sketches we had been making, after a few pretty disastrous attempts at pulling flat cane (you squash it before you pull it, so its flat... it creates a wider band of colour or pattern than just a regular round cane)  I got one, with a huge amount of assistance from Nancy. I also pulled twisted cane, regular straight cane and some coloured cup cane. Then I had to figure out what I wanted to do with it all...

I started with a few simple coloured pieces using one layer of cane over the top, and then progressed onto trying multiple layers of cane, I could get really technical here but I'm going to try and steer clear of doing that and show you a picture of the results instead.

Funnily enough I love the monotone pieces, the white on black piece and the white on white piece are my favorite and these are what I am going to use as a base for my experimentation and development during my residency at the Edinburgh College of Art.

I think I could go on for a while about the various joys of Pilchuck... Amazing new friends, midnight sushi, midnight beers, midnight steak, parties, the pond, inspiration point etc etc but I am just to show you a few more pictures instead.

Thanks for reading. Hopefully more coming soon about my residency in Edinburgh.