Miracle of Glass: 3,500 Years of Creative Work

April 15 to June 3, 2007

Donald and Pamela Bierstock Gallery

The CANADIAN CLAY & GLASS GALLERY, according to its mandate, has installed many exhibitions of contemporary glass and shown works of current glass studio artists.

In its permanent collection the Gallery also has a number of scale models that demonstrate the development of glass making techniques and the evolution of the furnace. These models were designed and constructed by myself, a long time associate of the Gallery, who besides my other professional interests, has developed a keen interest in the history of glass and has studied especially the technical evolution of glass making. This work, going on for over 30 years, has resulted in a masters thesis featuring the technology and typology of pre-Roman and Roman Glass.

I have been lucky enough to visit many of the world’s museums collections of ancient glass and has accumulated thousands of photographs to support this study. I have produced many films, and later, videos for the Corning Museum of Glass and the Austrian Glass Museum at Baernbach, where I also act as a scientific advisor.

The Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery will show this coming spring, opening on April 15th, a special exhibition “ MIRACLE OF GLASS “ which will I have curated along with Mrs. Heather Siemens as my associate curator. Many of the exhibition pieces have been collected by me over the years and some are from my own private collection. Some exhibition pieces were made , in co-operation with myself, by renowned glass artist Karl Schantz, demonstrating ancient techniques.

The exhibition will feature some of Karl Schantz’s core formed vessels and further show pieces that represent the evolution of glass-making technology through the ages, some industrial products from the King Collection and various objects from the galleries own permanent collection of contemporary class.

These were some of the ideas that I was exploring within the context of this exhibition.

MIRACLE OF GLASS “ ...... Is it really a miracle ? We use glass every day, almost everywhere, we take it for granted as a part of our lives. It is cheap, easy to clean and, yes, it breaks occasionally, then we throw it away.

But have we all forgotten that glass , as a man made material, is perhaps a bit over 3.500 years old?

When it was first made, somewhere in southern Mesopotamia, it was worth more then gold, worth as much as desirable precious stones such as “lapis lazuli”, a beautiful blue stone, a gift for kings. Interesting enough, the first glass makers were called “Makers of Lapis Lazuli”.

Some recipes were preserved on clay tablets and buried under ruined libraries. They were excavated in recent times. From these we can learn that the glass-makers needed “Lots of good beer”, as they said, “to please the Gods of Glass Making” who were absolutely essential to make glass.

Blown vase

About 1500 BC very small quantities of primitive glass were made in Mesopotamia and also in Egypt to create small vessels and beads. They were formed painstakingly on clay or sand cores. “Glass-blowing” was not discovered until about the time of the birth of Christ.

In Roman times good and clear glass was already manufactured in many workshops all over the Empire. By this time, almost all the tools and techniques of the trade had been introduced. They have not changed very much during the last 2,000 years.

It may be important to review an object that is even older then glass vessels and was produced in

quantity. Beads, having bridged the separation of glass and ceramics in antiquity, may well have been the first objects which eventually resulted in the making of larger objects and the transition from glazing to forming glass on a clay core .

While glass by itself was always desirable as an un-decorated artifact, eventually surface decorations were introduced. Engraving and lathe-cutting and, of course wheel polishing, helped to remove surface flaws , often not avoidable in ancient techniques.

Later, these methods enhanced glass objects just as decorations. Perhaps tried first as painting on the glass, enameling evolved to make the painted decorations on the glass surface more permanent. Some of these decorative techniques, practiced on Islam glass, became the forerunners of the perfection achieved by Venetians in Renaissance time. Surface decorations were also perfected in the Netherlands and France, as well as England and Germany. Later variations of style evolved in Bohemia and southern Austria.

The glass workshops in rural Austria that had evolved from the primitive “Wald Glas” ( forest glass ) houses eventually tried to emulate the works of their more affluent competitors to the south and the north. The glassware from the alpine workshops represents some typical expressions of local folk art.

America and Canada tried to establish a consumer glass industry, independent from European imports, and some of the exhibition pieces in our show will demonstrate their unique flair.

The exhibition will include a few pieces of industrial mass production, together with video documentation of their methods of manufacture by sophisticated machines.

Fairly recently the” Studio Glass Movement ” found its appreciation, we can see that the historical cycle closes here to lead us back to traditional methods. Artfully made products of modern “ Studio Glass” are made just the same way as they would have been made in Roman workshops or by Venetian artists in Renaissance times.

Our exhibition, opening on April 15th, will demonstrate the techniques and results of their application during these thousands of years