{"id":99158,"date":"2025-11-17T08:49:37","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T15:49:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=99158"},"modified":"2025-11-18T09:11:08","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T16:11:08","slug":"studio-de-verre-in-south-salt-lake-is-a-furnace-of-creativity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/studio-de-verre-in-south-salt-lake-is-a-furnace-of-creativity\/","title":{"rendered":"Studio-de-Verre in South Salt Lake is A Furnace of Creativity"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Group<\/a>

Members of Studio-de-Verre\u2019s collaborative team gather outside the building for a group portrait\u2014an image that reflects the collective expertise and long-standing partnerships that fuel the studio\u2019s creative output.<\/p><\/div>\n

Glass is one of the more remarkable materials found in nature. Spewed from a volcano, molten glass can cool quickly in the air before landing as obsidian, which when broken produces sharp edges that make perfect tools for cultures that lack metals. Dissolved in water, it precipitates out in its purest form, quartz, making geometric crystals that can grow to almost any size or fill cracks in other rocks. Its range of colors, from clear to smoky or rose, make it desirable as an ornamental material. The basic constituent, silicon dioxide, usually called silica, is the most common mineral on the surface of the Earth, most often seen in sands, some of which are rare and in great demand; microscopic variations in the surface of grains make some sands good for certain tasks, such as turning cement to concrete, while whole deserts of other sands just don\u2019t work right.<\/h4>\n

Elsewhere, glass is one of the most versatile and valuable materials invented and made by people. While its uses seem limitless, it\u2019s actually uncommon in human experience until recently. This is because glass is hard to make, difficult to work, and nearly impossible to recycle. And it\u2019s fragile, easily broken, and then usually beyond repair. Whole populations lived and died without encountering it. If we scan human history, it\u2019s easier to count the societies that had glass than those that didn\u2019t. Egypt: wealthy Egyptians had jewelry and personal effects made of glass, which was essentially interchangeable with jewels. We know next to nothing about these charming and impressive materials, if only because their makers kept the secret of their creation. Likewise the Romans, who also used glass for tableware: bowls, tumblers, and goblets among them. Their secrecy was so complete that we don\u2019t know where they were made; perhaps in some remote corner of the empire like Palestine.<\/h4>\n

One thing we do know is that glass can be made in two very separate steps. The first involves melting sand, using chemicals that lower its melting point and furnaces that produce high heat. That\u2019s one of the things we don\u2019t know about these ancestors: no one has found an adequate, ancient furnace, or even the ruins of one. But this half-glass, now called cullet, could be shipped cold to a distant workshop, where it was heated and worked in ways that we are rediscovering today.<\/h4>\n
\"Two<\/a>

Completed works line the studio\u2019s walls.<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Dan<\/a>

A fused glass piece by Dan Cummings showcases his signature precision: black and white abstract elements stretch and coil across a metallic ground, revealing the complex patterns achievable through layered heatwork.<\/p><\/div>\n

Through the years, there was some wonderful glass made. Mirrors from Bohemia and goblets blown in the Venetian island of Murano are popular examples. But as a truly artistic medium, glass was hobbled by the need for factory-scaled workplaces. Are beautiful objects produced by teams of laborers under the direction of designers works of art? It depends on how the terms are defined, but almost none of the glass objects made until recently were the work of one person toiling alone, in solitude, to express that one person\u2019s experience or view of life. Such things are hard to market and do not appeal to the factory aesthetic.<\/h4>\n

Throughout the 20th century, individual artists and small groups tried to find a way to work glass the way painters paint. The breakthrough came in the mid-1960s, in the American midwest, where two men, one an abstract expressionist-inspired potter and the other a chemist who would go on to create the tiles that protected space shuttles from the fiery heat of reentry, brought together furnace designs based on ceramic kilns and glass formulas suitable for small batches that could be worked in a studio. Today, artists wanting to work with glass come from all over the world to study and practice what became known as studio glass.<\/h4>\n

A superb example of a studio glass workshop, one of the most substantial to be found anywhere, occupies a converted industrial building in what remains of a commercial area on the southern edge of Salt Lake City. Here a large, colorful, mock-glass sign on the street side declares Studio-de-Verre to be a \u201cGlassart Studio and Gallery.\u201d The name, which starts in traditional French, to which it grafts one of the several English names for studio glass, thereby makes the first nod to the synergism that continues to allow individuals and small groups to meet the daunting demands of glass for large spaces and multiple resources. For comparison, all over the world artisans use gold-plated glass beads that a few years ago we found being made in an apartment just outside Prague, where they were electroplated in the bathtub.<\/h4>\n
\"Worktable<\/a>

A worktable at Studio-de-Verre holds an assortment of relief molds, framed glass panels, sketches, and sculptural components\u2014evidence of the layered processes behind the studio\u2019s fused, carved, and cast glass techniques.<\/p><\/div>\n