Glass Furnace, Istanbul
(by Dominic Fondé)
The Glass Furnace is a teaching facility and centre of excellence for all aspects of glass art making situated approximately twenty five miles from Istanbul. Its avowed aim is to provide a high standard of glass education to its students, to bring local and international artists together with glass friends and to contribute to the development of contemporary Turkish glass and fine arts”. Courses at the Glass Furnace range from two day workshops to intensive two week master classes. It sounds fantastic and based on the images I’ve seen the equipment looks pretty good too. According to the Glass Furnace website facilities range from bead making torches through to kilns for fusing, slumping and casting, lathes, belt grinders and engraving tools and of course glory holes and furnaces. A, glory hole, for the uninitiated, is a large heating chamber for keeping molten glass soft and pliable once it is gathered from the furnace and generally speaking it kicks out around 1200°C of heat. As a glass blower it is the furnaces and glory holes Jane will be working with. Getting hot in the hot shop is the aim of the workshop with as much hands on experience as possible” she says with a grin. It sounds very jovial and she certainly intends for her students to have fun, however a quick glance at the plan for the workshop reveals a rigorous course being taught from a very particular point of view. She emphasizes the use of gravity, heat and centrifugal force as the main glassmaking tools and talks about how repetition and practice are important along with experimentation. In her own words, “students learn about posture and a basic philosophical understanding of the material. From there, with practice, students will develop skills to enable them to make a variety of hot formed component pieces that will go together to make larger installation works. Understanding the movement and flow of hot glass is the focus. Students will have the required skills after this course to take up glass making as an interest or passion and/or continue to further develop their own work.”
Of course you can have the best equipment in the world but it is worthless if you don’t have a good teacher. This is where Jane comes in. Jane grew up in Australia where she studied, built her own studio and established herself as a professional artist. Never content with resting on her laurels she travelled extensively gaining experience working in artists’ studios and glassmaking factories in places as diverse as Britain, Japan, China and Singapore. She has served on the boards of Ausglass and JamFactory and taught in many education establishments around the world. In early 2008 she formed Art Glass Solutions, a Singapore based company dedicated, as the name suggests, to producing art glass. Jane has a frantically busy schedule this year which includes a solo show in March, a number of collaborative group exhibitions in May and November as well as a number of high profile commissions through the new company. In-between she will be finding time to teach at the Glass Furnace.
Teaching is clearly something very important to Jane. She has taught in a number of institutions and on arriving in Singapore rapidly began her own small home/studio where she began teaching private students. Art Glass Solutions, the company she started with me in 2008, continues this approach having a dedicated department for education. In March Jane will be teaching the first Murrini Roll Up glass blowing class in Singapore for Art Glass Solutions using a homemade glory hole. It is going to be interesting to see how the students cope with standing in front of such a fiercely hot piece of equipment in the heat and humidity of Singapore. Turkey I imagine is scarcely any cooler.
Jane’s class in Turkey is aimed at beginners and intermediates in glassblowing.
Reading this, one word leaps out. Passion. Jane has a passion for glass and a passion for art. She is keen to communicate this and it becomes infectious. This by the way is the primary cause of my jealousy. I trained as a glassblower in the UK and Jane and I share a similar passion for our art, this is why we became business partners after all. In recent years I have veered away from glassblowing into engraving but there really is nothing to take the place of the visceral thrill of handling glowing molten glass. It has been two years since I was last in a blowing studio and I find myself missing glassblowing badly. There is a growing temptation to abandon the office and enroll in Jane’s class. My glassblowing skills, intermediate at the best of times must surely have degraded to the level of rank amateur by now.