Molten Masterpieces
Fusing glass to create works of art
STORY BY TAYLOR MATTSON
photos by Rachel Brown
Carefully stacking the last tiny, sharp piece of glass on top of the other pieces, Lee Everett finishes her work after spending hours on the process. One tiny bump of the table will ruin her masterpiece, so she gingerly sets her work down in a massive ceramic box and walks away.
It’s a cold, cloudy day in Bellingham, but inside the ceramic box, the temperature begins to rise. Everett’s current glass fusing project — set so meticulously — starts to melt as the box quickly climbs from 100 to 500 degrees Fahrenheit.
Still, the temperature climbs — 800 degrees, 1,000 degrees — and the once separate, solid pieces begin to blend into one another.
The temperature inside the ceramic box — called an electric kiln — finally reaches 1,600 degrees. After several hours, the “ding” of the timer echoes in Everett’s studio, notifying her that her project is finished.
Gently, Everett opens the kiln to examine the chemical reaction the molten temperatures caused in the glass.
“It’s like Christmas morning when I open up my kiln,” Everett says. “You know what you put in there, but you only get to see the finished product after the kiln has worked its magic.”
Glass is generally seen as a sharp, rigid, sturdy and hard-to-manipulate artistic medium, Everett says. But adding heat into the equation changes everything. Glass fusing uses the malleability and molten characteristics of heated glass to create blended works of art using broken, colored fragments of glass.
Glass fusing dates as far back as 2000 B.C., but gained popularity in America during the 1960s in response to a rising interest in the arts, Everett says. By joining bits of glass together under extreme temperatures, glass fusing is used for a variety of items, including lamps, windows and other house fixtures, Everett says.
Bellingham is home to four glass-fusing studios, including Everett’s Green Frog Glass studio. Everett taught glass-fusing courses at Western from spring 2013 to winter 2014, and offers classes open to the Bellingham community.
Glass fusing requires a steady hand, patience and knowledge. The bits of glass vary in size and type, and not all kinds of glass melt well together, Everett says. Glasses with different expansion and cooling rates will not fuse together and will break and crack in the kiln.
“It’s like buying a soda bottle at one store, and then buying another at a different store. They look the same, but can be totally different based on the manufacturer and the chemical process used to make them,” Everett says. “You need to ensure your glass is all the same to ensure it will melt and cool at the same rate.”
Attention to detail is vital, but once the process is mastered it can become therapeutic, Everett says. While teaching classes at Western, Everett had many dedicated pupils, such as Western student Lindsey Allen, return each quarter to learn more about glass art.
“Glass fusing is so calming, and you can make some really cool things,” Allen says. “You can sit down and work with your project as long as you want and it won’t go anywhere. It’s a really Zen experience.”
In addition to fusing classes, Allen has also taken glass-blowing classes. Despite their shared medium, fusing and blowing are two completely different takes on glass, Everett says.
“You spend a long time planning in glass blowing, and get a small window of time to mess around with your glass and actually make your work,” Everett says. “Where in glass fusing you have a shorter amount of time for planning, and a much longer time to create your piece.”
Unlike the pool of melted, hot glass used in glass blowing, fusing deals with ground-up shards of glass called frit. Everett equips her studio with many sizes and colors of frit, ranging from sheets of glass to a refined flour-like powder. When she runs out of the size she needs, she improvises.
“If I don’t have any frit in grey, and I need grey, and I’ve got a big sheet of grey glass, I’ll bash the heck out of it,” Everett says. “It’s really fun — we did it in the classes I taught through Western. Students got a kick out of it.”
Despite the intense temperatures and potential hazards of working with glass, creators of all ages can fuse with the proper guidance, Everett says.
“I love [fusing] because it seems difficult and scary, but it’s really not,” says Angie Larrabee, who assists with glass fusing at Fairhaven ceramic shop Creativitea. “You get to cut and manipulate the glass, which seems like a dangerous thing, but it isn’t, and you can make really beautiful work with it.”
After carefully removing her finished piece from the kiln, Everett lays it down on the table and steps back to admire her work. A glimmering leaf-shaped piece speckled with shades of green, soon to be part of a larger stained-glass tree, reflects back at her.
The heat of the kiln transformed what once was a scattered collection of tiny shards of glass into a blended work of chemically transformed art, a process that never ceases to leave Everett in wonder and amazement.