Skill and Snobbishness

Antoine Leperlier, a well-known French glass artist, visited Plymouth College of Art yesterday and gave an interesting talk about his work.

His focus is trying to capture time and one of the ways he does this is by including a bubble in a block of cast glass.  He says it's really tricky to catch the bubble as it rises through the block.

He seems to have avoided lots of failures by using the same size glass block, over and over again.  In that way, the basics are a given and he can focus on experimenting with what's inside the block - sometimes bubbles, sometimes other stuff including elements like ceramics that might behave unpredictably.

Antoine is in college for two days and soon after he arrived yesterday I had a chat with him and Glen Carter, our glass lecturer,  about my carrot project , which I was working on at the time.

We got to talk about whether and how I would join the two parts of my smaller piece.  Initially, I had intended to join them with UV glue but Antoine said I should bond them together by encasing them in plaster and heating them in a kiln.

He acknowledged that it would be risky but he said artists that knew their stuff would appreciate the skill in achieving this.  Glen agreed with him.

I was a little irked by this.  I think I'm playing to the gallery, as Grayson Perry would say, rather than trying to impress an elite.  On the other hand, I suppose I have to impress the elite if I want to be considered as one of them.

But do I?  Well, only in as much as I want to be recognised as an artist.  I don't want to get sucked into a snobbish world.

Later on, Antoine said UV glue would do a poor job.  You'd be able to see it and it would run down inside the hollow carrot.

Now that I care about!

I'll do some research into the technology of joining.

UPDATE:  I've chewed over this issue with technical types at Bullseye in the U.S..  They say that heating up the casts so the glass becomes tacky will result in me losing the surface definition of the hollow carrot, which I don't want to do.  

Bullseye recommends bonding the pieces together with a specific epoxy glue, Hxyal-NYL-1, which is widely used by art restorers because it's crystal clear and doesn't not yellow with age.