NO SUCCESS LIKE FAILURE

A thread started on the popular Warm Glass Bulletin Board about experimentation, failure and success seems like a good reason to wander away for a moment from my COE rant where I’m probably leaving the impression that I think the misunderstanding of COE was the biggest goof-up ever at Bullseye.

Not likely. We mess up so much and so regularly that it’s hard to identify the real award winners here. But this is one I especially like:

LIQUID VELOCITY 3. One of a series of works by artist Jun Kaneko in which the internal flow of one glass through another – a totally unanticipated disaster – became the central dynamic of the work itself.


It all started with the intention of making a simple, but - as usual here’s the problem – LARGE piece: an L-shaped glass form. The intended work was supposed to eventually look like this…

TRANSLUCENT ANGLE. This is where the techs were headed.

…only with lateral stripes, like this…

ARCTIC. This is what the slabs look like when the dams hold.

The original idea was to make it all in one casting. A long horizontal leg (unlike the single colored piece shown here) made up of many strips of clear sheet glass, interspersed with the occasional strip of solid opal color, would sit on the shelf, while the shorter vertical leg would rise out of it at one end. All encased in refractory board.

Over 600 strips of sheet glass, meticulously cut, cleaned, weighed and dammed to contain the flow of over 300 pounds of glass.

The guys had been successful in making a small prototype, so felt pretty confident in scaling up.

Lesson One: Confidence is not your friend when you start to work larger. (Think BECon 07 here.)

Lesson Two: Never leave the country when R&E is in major Experiment Mode. I missed the opportunity to get photos of what happened next. Which, in short, was the weight of the vertical column of glass once fluid, creating more downward pressure than the restraining dams of the horizontal leg could contain.

Untaken Picture: 300 pounds of molten glass off the edge of the kiln shelf, eating away at the bottom of a 4’ x 8’ kiln – bricks, elements, confidence…

Meet Paul M., our resident R&E engineer. Why is he smiling? Because suddenly the mind-deadening tedium of cleaning, inspecting and laying up thousands of strips of sheet glass seems a DELIGHT compared to having to rebuild an entire kiln floor.

In the end the Jaws of Defeat yield yet another Victory to our intrepid R&E team.

In spite of the enormous loss of glass and kiln floor, the techs figured out how to recreate the dramatic, progressive flow pattern that had happened as the pressure from the vertical column forced the stripes to arch fluidly within the interior of the clear slab.

By replacing the vertical column with a slide loaded with a precisely determined volume of glass, they could force the flow without overloading the dams.

The finished “flow bars” are unlike cast glass as we’ve known it. Fluid, but solid. A snapshot of the essence of this material. And just more proof that unless we push it, take risks, try new things, and master disaster, we’re missing out on the best that glass has to offer.

OK…coldworking 300 pound slabs has never been my idea of “the best that glass has to offer”….

LIQUID VELOCITY 2. Part of NEW GLASS by Jun Kaneko at the Bullseye Gallery.

The Kaneko exhibition is up now and will run through July. So BECon 07 attendees will be able to see some seriously big glass and talk to the techs who had to manage the challenges (multi-point pyrometry etc) of the project.

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PS. In response to Toni’s comment below, I’m adding these images as proof that our techs don’t get to have all the fun.

MYTHOLOGY: 42 linear feet of glass threads, 60,000 individual stringers, all laid up by the artist.

52,304…52,305…52,306…