MADE AT HOME: WORDS OF ISOLATION | WORDS OF CONNECTION by Laura Quinn
Learning lampworking with a chef’s torch. 2020
In April 2020, during the early stage of the COVID-19 lockdown, I had just started employment at University for the Creative Arts (UCA) in Farnham, UK, as the Glass Technical Tutor. The staff and students at UCA began to reform learning methodologies in response to the rapidly changing restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Once full national lockdown began, we turned to online teaching and learning. It became a time when tutorials between teaching staff and students to discuss projects and ideas was facilitated through online video conferencing. There was a distinct frustration from both sides as it has been an established custom for educators and learners to navigate craft and glass education with the knowledge and information that hands-on making provides. With limited resources, but a need to keep our hands learning, I started to use and teach with unconventional tools and materials from around my house, or that were easily accessible online. Through live video calling demonstrations and GASNEWS
Learning lampworking at the kitchen table using a chef’s torch. 2020
classes, paired with pre-recorded and edited online video tutorials, my students began, or continued to learn, fundamental processes in coldworking by using wet and dry sandpaper, lampworking with a chef’s torch, copper foiling, etching, laminating, glass cutting, and glass bending using a candle flame. As the weeks went on, seeing the positive impact of setting these at-home tasks for my students, I decided to share them publicly through social media and on my YouTube channel. The series of videos entitled, Home Glass Hacks, allowed students, glass makers and complete novices to start, or continue to develop their material and process knowledge by using accessible tools from around the house. One of the Home Glass Hacks shows how to bend thin glass stringers using a candle. When I was conceptualizing this, I couldn’t help but remember what I had learned about glass bending during a class at Neon Workshops in Wakefield, UK. I began to bend the glass into words, starting with a simple message to the
W F AI N L LT E2R0 2200 1 4 V OVL O U LMUEM3E4 ,2 5I S, SI S U SEU4E 4
community, Hello. I shared the message with the public online, and to my surprise it seemed to garner attention. At a time when the global community was separated by isolation, our written and spoken words and messages online became so important. Connections through social media allowed us to communicate our paradoxical experience of shared isolation in a way that hadn’t existed before. It became poignant to capture these words in a physical form. Translating the words we use to connect into the material of glass seems to have an ability to make something be viewed as precious, as delicate, and fragile. This was the inspiration for the Words of Isolation | Words of Connection project. Words of Isolation | Words of Connection is an international collaborative project that calls on members of the public to get involved in communicating their experience of the COVID-19 isolation through making glass words by bending glass stringers using a tealight candle flame. Submissions to the project have
21 5
