Professional Practice 2 (3)

Busy morning at Glass Xpressions today. Everyone was still flat out organising deliveries when I get there and Sean was putting a third sheet of glass into a kiln to slump into a sign for a local real estate agent. The previous two had not turned out successfully and the sign is required for the new office opening next monday - so this one has to work!

I spent more than half of the morning with Cathy, the accounts person, checking details for the workshop we are organising for the first weekend in May.

I was very concerned this morning when I discovered that I didn't have a confirmation for the flight I had booked to get our artist from Canberra up here to the Gold Coast. After checking the credit card statement and making a couple of phone calls to Virgin Blue we finally found that the flight was booked (phew!) but they just hadn't emailed the confirmation for some reason! Still, it's all confirmed now and bookings are now being made by those attending the demonstration - I have spent a lot of time this week answering enquiries and making sure that everyone has the payment details - it looks like we should have a good crowd for on the day.I have also been putting in a proposal to Ausglass for some funding for the event. This was approved at the last meeting, so we have got some money to put towards the fee for our artist.

Once we had all got our admin stuff sorted out, we didn't have much time left, so instead of doing our wax models we had a meeting to discuss the technical aspects a design that Lisa has come up with for a work that she would like to make and enter into the Ranamok Glass Art Prize competition this year. It would be a very challenging piece of slumped glass as it is large, and fixing it into a base will be difficult. By the end of the meeting we were all agreed that it will have to be designed around a steel rod supporting structure and Lisa is aiming to make a float glass mock up for us to have a look at by next week.

Professional Practice 2 (2)

My second thursday morning at Glass Xpressions.

For the next few weeks it is my turn to teach a new skill - I am teaching Lisa, Mia and Sean how to do lost wax casting.

In preparation for today I found the Barnes showroom in Brisbane and went there on monday to stock up on wax and the other necessities needed to start making wax models. This morning I packed up my hot-plate, pans and tools and have set up an area in the studio to start melting wax.

Most of the morning was spent going through the basics. I showed everyone the best sort of pans for melting the wax in and how to pour it into different containers to make various sizes of wax blocks for moulding into shapes. 

Lisa had a roll of waxed paper - the backing paper from commercial signs produced in the factory unit next door, and this proved to be an excellent surface for pouring wax onto to create thin sheets for model making.

By the end of the morning we were able to start moulding the wax into shapes and start working the surface with tools, Lisa and Sean have promised to work on their models during the week so that we will soon each have something to make a mould of.

                                 Making a mess with wax already

Lisa and sean contemplating what vessels will make the best moulds for the wax

Professional Practice 2 (1)

 Time to blow away the cobwebs and start blogging again.

This new series of posts are to record my thursday mornings spent at Glass Xpressions, which is where I am doing my placement for the industry experience part of my Professional Practice 2 course at QCA.

Glass Xpressions is run by the fabulous Lisa who, apart from running the busiest glass splashback business on the Gold Coast, is an accomplished glass artist creating glass installation pieces for residential and commercial projects all over South East Queensland. In recent times she has completed a 5 metre diameter glass wall installation for a home in Sovereign Island and an installation piece for Griffith University's Gold Coast Campus commemorating the original occupiers of the land. I hope to post photo's of these works soon.

So today was my first session with the team. By the time I arrived at 9am, Lisa had already completed the first task of the day (the first task of everyday!) which is organising all the deliveries for that day and sending off vans full of glass panels for jobs all over the local area with all the information needed for successful installation.

This done, Lisa could relax and settle into the project she had organised for myself and Mia to complete this morning. Lisa's background is in stained glass so this morning she set about teaching Mia and myself how to cut detailed glass shapes for lead lighting. Mia's training is as a glass blower, she is Finnish and has trained at Kosta Boda in Sweden for many years, but she has never cut glass shapes before. I have had some experience of cutting glass for projects, but I have always managed to avoid cutting fiddly shapes.

Lisa gave us both a standard design and showed us just how to get all the shapes fitting together.

 Mia (left) and Lisa

I enjoyed the process of working out just which parts of the glass to cut away first in order to end up with the shape I wanted, but Mia found it quite frustrating trying to make the brittle and fragile glass break the way she wanted it to, she is so used to moulding and manipulating hot glass (a skill that most people in the world would agree is immeasurably harder!) that she found cold brittle glass very unpleasant to deal with - it was hard to break, would then break the wrong way and was prone to those horrible sharp splinters.

In the end I was happy with my results - although I know that Mia was not quite so happy with her results.

My pieces all pretty much fitted together, and with a little grinding would make up successfully into a leadlight panel. Having said that, I still don't think I will ever have much need for such fiddly details in my work - but you never know!

                    Cutting out all the pieces with the help of a template