Made at Home: Words of Isolation | Words of Connection

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 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 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 been made by scientists, engineers, butchers, artists, entrepreneurs, photographers, teachers, and students to list a few. Words of Isolation | Words of Connection crosses boundaries, language, race, sex, gender, age, religion, background, and culture. The low-tech and low-cost nature of the process allows the work to become accessible to a large and diverse group. Through the creative catharsis of craft, it provides a physical representation of the feelings and words we have been sharing during this virtually unified period in the COVID-19 crisis. The project has allowed the public to develop their relationship with glass, a material many of which have never worked with before. It has opened up conversation and further appreciation of our craft.

For some makers, where the treadmill of orders, exhibitions, and commissions keeps coming in, national lockdowns brought a full stop to this momentum. This had a significant, negative impact on many small businesses, but it has also provided many with a chance to finally make improvements to their studio equipment and processes, and to make changes that allow their process to become more sustainable.

This project has given me and many other makers the opportunity to create work in a far more accessible and sustainable way due to the low-fi making method and lower energy consumption needed to form the glass, compared to traditional gas furnaces and torches. The project resonates with greater global objectives such as the Sustainable Development Goals set out by the UN in climate action, responsible consumption and production, and reduced inequality. This project and its gaining momentum on an international level has forced me to ask myself, “How much energy do I need to spend to make glass art that matters?”

Recent participants to the project include Hilltop Artists in Tacoma, who work with youths from a varying socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. They will be making glass words with their students over the coming year to be submitted to the project and shown at the Glass Art Society Conference in Tacoma, WA, in 2022.

The first iteration of the project has been installed as part of the Design and Craft Council of Ireland outdoor exhibition trail, Connected, which is running throughout Kilkenny city from 30 July- 20 October. During this time, Ireland has gone from COVID-19 restrictions where national travel was possible, to county-wide travel limited to a 5km radius from their homes. The artworks in the Connected exhibition are displayed outdoors across the city of Kilkenny.

This has provided a way for exhibitions to continue, but it has also allowed the work to reach a public which has changed immensely in the time it has been on display, from a national audience to a local community audience.

The project has paralleled our experience of the period of isolation. Each work is made in isolation, but when we are all allowed to be back together again so too can the glass words, it is a reflection, and a celebration of community and resilience in one of the most challenging years we will have experienced.

When an artwork encapsulates a range of people’s experiences and reaches those who it would never have previously, when it allows a creative catharsis for people across different countries, when it allows young makers a chance to add to their resume and professional practice by being involved in an international collaborative art work, and all made with a candle, I wonder how can I learn from this and include its more sustainable nature in my work after the pandemic? I hope that being away from our usual modes of making has allowed us to consider more closely what we are making and why we are making it. Perhaps it will allow us a chance to make sustainable changes to our glass practice.

The Words of Isolation | Words of Connection project is ongoing, you are invited to get involved by making and submitting a glass word that reflects your time in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic. More information about the project is available here: https://www. lauraquinndesign.com/open-call www.lauraquinndesign.com www.instagram.com/lauraquinndesign www.facebook.com/lauraquinndesign