GcB

2. Yup, it’s stringer essentially sitting out in space. The supporting structure is a spiral of glass “noodle” that’s been cut and pieced together from straight pieces. It’s set up to come together in a single firing–I find that multiple firings make it harder to control the final texture, so I just plan it so everything comes together at once, kinda Rube Goldberg-fashion.

It’s a bit of a balancing act. Superglue holds the pieces in place but will burn off well before tack-fuse temps, so the pieces have to balance and support each other. I build this stuff so that the load is transferred to the center bottom.

In this case, some of the stringers are shorter and act as spacers for the arms of the spiral, while the arms of the spiral support the longer stringers.

It’s set into a small ball mold, building from the center out. Takes a little while (and a LOT of stringer) to accomplish.

Next step is to see how far I can get this technique to crawl up the walls without collapsing. (I think, anyway) that the underside is more interesting than the top of this piece, and I’d like to expose it as sides of a “basket.”

Of course, the more vertical you make this stuff, the more critical the firing schedule gets–you’ve got to get most of your heatwork done before the piece actually droops, so that it takes relatively little time at top temp to get the work done.

I’m thinking I’ll finish the piece off with some kind of funky base. I’m waffling on knocking the little dangling ends off–on the one hand they contribute to the woven look, on the other they’re messy and liable to come off anyway…very fragile.

Anyway, it’s a fun exercise. Doing something similar in that same firing with glass triangles, a piece I’m calling “Arrowneous.” Didn’t want to get the whole studio out to photograph test pieces, so the picture was lousy. I’m finding these tackfuses can be challenging to photograph without a lot of setup.

I really like the “open” look of this…it kind of reminds me of some African basket work in my collection.

GcB