Contemporary Canadian Glass

By Jill Allan

From June 15^th to July 2^nd I attended the neon making class ‘Illuminating Experiments’ taught by Jeremy Bert at Pilchuck Glass School in Washington State.  Before leaving for the course I was looking forward not only to all the new skills I would be learning but also to a change of venue and an opportunity to reflect on my career path.  My desire to learn about neon has been growing over the past few years, inspired by a series of patterned drawings with thread and paper that I want to adapt into a series of neon screens – making shapes with light.   I now feel that this body of work is within the realm of my ability!

Pilchuck Glass School is located on a mountainside close to Stanwood, Washington.  It is a peaceful and beautiful setting.  Students are housed in dormitories or cottages and provided with three meals a day, access to a print shop, wood shop, metal shop, library, the internet, state-of-the-art glass making and finishing studios and equipment, a school store, and an open, optimistic atmosphere of creative energy.  Every evening after dinner we enjoyed slide presentations of work made by the instructors, artists-in-residence or staff.  When I was there, approximately 110 people on campus (staff and students) were also in attendance.  I was in a class with eight other students, a teacher, and three teaching assistants.  We received a lot of instruction and support from the teaching staff and enjoyed lectures and demonstrations from visiting artists invited to Pilchuck from nearby Seattle.

In order to make neon you need variously configured torches which allow you to heat the glass tubes specifically.  The ribbon burner torch has a long flame that allows the artist to evenly heat a large area of tube.  The other torches used have torch heads that face each other to make a hot zone between them; these torches are either hand held or mounted on a stand at which you can work while standing with glass tubing in both hands.  When using the hand held torch to make a ‘butt’ joint between two pieces of tubing or an electrode and tubing, one of the pieces of glass tubing is held in place on a stable surface by bean bags because one of your hands is holding the torch.   In order to keep the tube from collapsing on itself while you are heating and shaping it a hose is attached to one end and the other end is sealed so that you can create pressure in the tube and inflate it slightly after making a bend.   It takes a while to get used to the torches and to figure out how not to kink the tubing or over-inflate the tubing, both of which make it vulnerable to breakage, or collapse under the pressure of the vacuum pump.  Joining two pieces of tubing together is also tricky as the two ends must be of equal heat and the joint must not be over-inflated or it will be weak.  I guess it is kind of like a one-person mini incalmo!  Most of the tubing we used was commercially made for the sign industry and coated in phosphorous to make the different colours available.  The colour also depends on which kind of gas is used:  either neon or argon.  The neon gas burns bright orange and the argon is a soft purple.  When you add a little bit of mercury to the argon it glows brightly white.  We did make our own tubing one day and tried different colours but the gasses glowed so brightly that the coloured glass didn’t really show up.  However, the optic molded glass made great affects!  Once the tubing is bent and has electrodes on it, it is sterilized and filled with gas and then it is ready to mount and light up.  Jeremy had come to Pilchuck with salvaged transformers for us to use to power our pieces.  We also experimented with using a solar panel to charge two batteries which powered two neon pieces and a bunch of LED lights.  I think that using solar energy as a power source increases the viability of neon as a public art resource.

Some things about making neon are really difficult!  For instance, making round gentle curves…it is very tricky to heat the glass evenly when you are heating a large area of it and to let it fall into that curved shape without making a kink in the curve.  Actually, making anything round is a great challenge!  I tried to balance practicing difficult shapes with making the patterned angular pieces that were based on my drawings.  I found a book in the campus library about Chinese Lattice designs and also worked from that for inspiration.  I observed the instructors at the ‘bombarder’ where the glass tubes are sterilized and then filled with a very specific volume of neon or argon.  Bombarding is extremely dangerous because of the high voltage used to heat the glass for sterilization, so we students were not permitted to use this piece of equipment.  The day before it was time to clean up everyone set up their projects for a studio ‘walk through’.  Our studio looked like a lantern from outside with all the windows glowing from our projects.

I am so grateful to have had this opportunity to learn about a new skill that I am eager to put to use in my practice!  I feel like there is a lot of potential for neon in terms of public art as well as pieces for private collections.  It means so much to me that Circle Craft Co-operative and the BC Glass Art Association were able to support me with scholarship funding to build a new skill that I can put to use in my practice as well as share with my community here at home.

Jill Allan is one of the Glass Art Association of Canada regional representatives for BC.  She graduated from the Alberta College of Art + Design in Calgary in 1999 and currently lives on Vancouver Island, travelling from there to Chemainus, Vancouver and Victoria to make her work.