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