Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
TINA OLDKNOW: I want to give you a little bit of an introduction to Tom, who he is and
what he does. Tom is a widely respected artist and studio glass pioneer who has devoted much
of his career to researching different formulations of glasses and hot forming techniques. He
earned his BFA degree in 1967 and his MFA in 1969 at Pratt Institute in New York City.
He also did post graduate study at the New School for Social Research in New York. He
is a fellow of the American Craft Council and a Massachusetts Living Treasure.
Tom was drawn to glass in the 1960ís while designing houses made out of inflatable plastic
for the developing world. Though he began working with glass in the early years of the
studio glass movement, Tom choose industrial sheet glass as the material for his art rather
than glass blowing and he began to explore industrial and architectural glass as a sculptural
medium. Over the last 35 years, Tom has used glass to build and define spaces that transform
surface, light and color. He fuses layers of glass with bubbles and other spatial elements
into unique works. In recent years he has dramatically shifted the scale of his work
from complex small scale objects, meant to be contemplated at close proximity to illusionistic
environments made of large architecturally scaled glass. As in his sculptures, he combines
fused layers of glass, spatial elements and gradations of color and reflections to manipulate
new modes of perception.
His recent architectural commissions include projects at Roosevelt Station in Queens. He
has also done projects for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Mint Museum of Craft and
Design in Charlotte, the University of Carolina Law School at Chapel Hill, University of North
Carolina and the Owens Corning World Headquarters in Toledo.
Tom and his work have had a long history here at the museum. His first piece was acquired
in 1976 and the second piece, which was acquired in 1979, was featured on the cover of the
museumís ground-breaking exhibition catalog, New Glass: A Worldwide Survey, which took
place in 1979. The museum now has 14 vessels and sculptures made by Tom, eight of which
came to the museum in 2006 as part of the gift, a really great gift of studio glass
donated to the museum by Ben and Natalie Heineman. An early vessel and sculpture by Tom are currently
on view in the Modern Gallery and you can see an example of his more recent sculpture
in the Contemporary Glass Gallery.
Tomís work is included in public and private collections around the world including the
Art Institute of Chicago, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine
Arts in Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Victoria & Albert in London, MusÈe des
Arts DÈcoratifs in Paris, the Museum Kunst Palast in D¸sseldorf, Germany, and the National
Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. He is very well represented around the world, and we
are very privileged to have him speak with us tonight.
Thank you Tom. [Applause]
TOM PATTI: Thank you, Tina. After that introduction, I donít know, I hope Iím up to the presentation
here. Iím very proud to be here. It was in 1975, the first time I visited Corning, and
I was asked to bring a couple pieces of work. One of those works was the first work that
was collected by a major museum anywhere, and it began to launch my career that Tina
just spoke about. That was the extended version of my resume. Iím going to have to find a way to shorten
that. My talk is autobiographical. What Iím going to try to do is to present a broad survey
of the last 35, 38 years of work. With the collection. . . Tina mentioned that thereís,
I think, 14 objects of mine in the collection now. So, between the talk, the slides, and
this collection, youíll know more about me than you want to know. You wonít have to
go to the internet to hear any more.
I think this workóthe first slideóis sort of typical about the. . . my interest in small-scale
objects. Part of the reason that they are small-scale is that in the initial part of
my career, I was interested in the conceptual process, the thinking process about how works
are created, about how form is generated. And the simplest resources for me, it wasnít
a . . . I probably could have chosen many different kinds of materials to work with,
but glass seemed to offer the greatest possibilities. That it could be transparent, opaque, when
it gets hot, it gets soft, when its cold, itís rigid. And sheet glass was the most
available to me. I had no real financial resources. It would have been difficult to create an
environment to work in glass in another way. Sheet glass was available in every dumpster
behind every glass shop in the city.
What I try to do is in this small-scale work is to . . . one of the unique things is to
try to void, work against some of the properties of glass. Where some I try to reinforce, some
I try to work against. And one obvious one is, we are all excited about the optical properties
of glass, and what I try to do is actually work against those properties. Iíve tried
to create the glass as a window into a space; I tried to give space content. If you have
the object . . . and I make them by hand, all my work is made by myself. So, if you
hold that object at handís length, in all these planesóthese horizontal planesówill
appear to extend beyond your own personal space; you can go into the object, like that.
So, thatís how I looked at these, and they were purely conceptual, I never. . . before
1975, when the first object sold, I spent 10 years working on them, and there was no
intent, I never thought of a market or selling them. I simply photographed them and documented
them.
This piece, this is the piece that Tina spoke about that was presented in a poster form,
and it became a cover for the New Glass exhibition [catalog]. Itís interesting, because it was
the first visual introduction to my work, and when I saw it I was impressed and I was
honored that Corning selected my work to represent the next 25 years of contemporary glass. While
I liked it, on the one hand, it failed to talk about the issues of what I was interested
in. Iíll use this to illustrate to you. You can look at it, and the emphasis is obviously
on the shape of the object, the way it is back-lit. But what it doesnít do is show
you, this is my slide of itóand this is like a slide I took, all the photographs, the early
photographs are my own and I put a tack in it to give it a sense of scale. But, what
you can now see by the way itís lit is the sort of cool logic of each layer of glass
represented. Instead of going into the furnace gathering glass and putting one layer on another
and creating this sort of magicówhat I call the paperweight mind-set of how does it get
in there or what happensóI broke it down into a composite of many different layers
and many different types of glasses. Each one Iíd put into a package that I called
a sequential program, so once gas is introduced into that volume, it will expand and it willólike
switches turn on and off ó[expand] each layer of glass to make it a particular, basic shape.
I would manipulate that shape, control it by other external forces and evolve a particular
form, here, but itís that gray, that translucent gray on that top surface, on top of an opaque
gray? Everything below that gray gets washed and becomes opalescent gray below that. The
body of it, the two-thirds of that lower section, are many layers of a bronze-colored glass.
Itís not one layer. But, thereís probably 10 or 15, thereís probably over 20 layers
of glass in that particular object.
All this relates to earlier work; Tina mentioned my interest in housing. I spent 10 years developing
what I thought of as. . . trying to develop solutions for low-cost housing for underdeveloped
countries or shelters for needy areas of the planet. This idea of taking materialsóplastics
and other kinds of thingsóand to be able to seal them off as membrane forms and to
introduce air in them, or gas in some way, and make a continuous surface just by the
pneumatic system fascinated me. I could put air into something and lift weight, and distribute
surface and material. I began to do very large things, explore them in trees, and on wateróon
all kinds of surfaces. This piece is over 40 feet in length. Itís suspended between
three large trees. Itís about probably 20 feet in height.
I began to explore glass, trying to figure out ways to soften the material, and I found
some insulating bricks, and I cut them up and I made a small oven. This is it, outside
in my yard where I used to live in this renovated farm house. I took the furnace, I just dug
a hole in the ground which would support the four sides, the five sides of the furnace,
and I made a little piece that I have in my hands, which is a door, and I took my welding
torches and I took some little chips of glass that I found and I melted [them], and then
I broke the aerial off my car and put the aerial in there, and I pushed it into this
three-inch chamberóthis four foot aerialóand it kept going in and in and in, because it
was melting. It was so hot! [Laughter] So, then I pull it out, the thing is about eight
inches long, and I ran and got a piece of steel pipe and I ripped off the door, stuck
that in there, pulled it out, and the whole furnace came out of the ground. [Laughter]
So,that was the beginning, but it was a fascinating process, and it intrigued me and I began to
continuously work with glass and inflated materials.
I developed inflatable plastics in the late ë60s, and these are some of the early experiments
where I could just use a candle and Iíd make a plastic straw, a tube form, and then inflate
it. I could create these complex forms just doing this, for years. There was actually
a film that was made thatís in the museum in New York on this.
This is the first studio in the 60ís. I built it onto that house that I was speaking about.
This is all found materials around the property. I built it onto the house so I could use the
heat generated from the equipment to provide additional heat for the interior of the house.
My bedroom was that little window up above on the roof.
While most people are familiar with my small-scale work, which the museum has mentioned, [it
has] many of them. Most people are not familiar with the large-scale work. So, Iím going
to talk about that. Realize that itís all idiosyncratic, itís all about my own little
personal search, finding my own aesthetic vocabulary with it, with glass.
This is 1985, and Iím going to jump around a little through here with the years, but
I think that it will conceptually hold together, the talk, and it will be a little more interesting.
These are large sheets of glass; these pieces probably cover a 40-foot square area on the
terrain. That skewed plane in the foreground that you see the ripples in, I threw a pebble
in when I took the photograph to show that itís not glass. When there is no ripple in
it, itís very glass-like, and all those angles reflect the environment. The more vertical
one, to the back, reflects the landscape; the others reflect portions of the sky. So,
when you look at that object, itís describing the entire environment that you are in.
Iíve always had this interest in the outdoors. When I say outdoors, Iím also saying nature,
as in natural, and itís about observation, perception that gives me great insight into
the work. I was talking to John, here, one of the local glass enthusiasts, and he mentioned
that heís been working with glass, and heís been involved with studying all the books
on glass, and I asked him how long? And he said about 10 years. And I said, well itís
time to let the books go, itís [time] to do the work and observe it, because you can
gain so much empirically by discovering, by just being with the material. At a certain
point, you have to let it go, you have to find out about it yourself. Thatís really
what I started many years ago, and Iím still trying to do it.
But a piece like thisóitís outside of our propertyóand Iíll go out and continuously
look at it. That was it, when there was mist on it during the summer. This is it when there
is mist on it in the fall, where the mist now creates a translucent surface, not sandblasted.
And it will change during the day. The sun will come up, it will dissolve off of the
surface. The piece is organic, it will constantly change. And here it is in the winter with
snow. Itís about going out every day, photographing it, observing it. I say that I made one piece,
but itís really not one piece, itís many pieces. Itís that fascination that I have
with observation, and thatís part of the reason that I hate to let my work go. To me,
they are the research for my work. I didnít make the work to sell it. I sell it now to
support the work that I want to do, but believe me, Iím amazed that it actually happened
like that.
Itís the observation and discovery that intrigues me the most. This is a relatively recent piece.
This is glass and stone, this again is outdoors. But itís about looking into the forest, seeing
the stone, but at the same time I have a glass that has a certain degree of reflected surface
on it, and youíre able to see through the glass in certain light conditions and simultaneously
be able to see it in reflected light. So, you can see the sky, you can see the forest
around it, and you can see through to the stone. There is a metal structure that I welded
that these sort of clip into, all these large glass planes in the rock.
A lot of my interests is this sense. . . I donít see variations in the work, like I
donít make one in red and then try to make one in blue or green, exhaust a number of
possibilities with variations to it.
I see them like this piece here, done in 1963. Itís fundamental to my work. Itís a progression
where you see, on the right, the lower portion is the dominant, and the upper portion is
subdominant, and you see just by moving the neck of that of that form down how you reverse
that. Then, you see, all the subtle changes in the surface are aesthetic choices. Someone
else, given that same program that I just mentioned, might evolve a whole different
look to what you see up there. But those are my aesthetic responses to that form. So, itís
one idea with four elements that make that up.
These are early drawings related to the housing. Thereís a lot of interest in my early work,
I think. There is more interest in my early work now, I think, than in what Iím doing.
But anyways, I wanted to include it. These are pod-like modular structures that create
a field of forms that, when I made these, that they are habitats, that these are habitable
structures of continuous surfaces, and you can see the engagement of the window-like
shapes in the foreground.
When I began to work with glass, it was that same interest. I used to begin my talks with,
Iím going to talk about art and architecture. People say, arenít you going to talk about
glass, and I say, well, I am going to talk about glass, but my interest is in art and
architecture, and I use glass as a material to explore these ideas. This is an early piece,
in the late ë60s, thatís not unlike the drawing that I just showed you. It has that
geometry that you see in my work, the large rectangle with a convex form.
This is another from that same period of work. When you look at these objects, some of them
will overlap, and that is why I ëm not going to show them in exact chronological order.
I could have worked on this shapeóI kept three or four of theseóbut I probably made
hundreds of them. I donít think that this one exists, the one Iím looking at. But,
while I was working on these, thereís often these little shoots that come off of it, where
I get these fragments of ideas that are inspired by this work, and I also explore those. The
ones, the ideas that seem to hold the most promise for me [are] the ones that I may know
the least about, or are intriguing to me, that sometimes I will leave this idea and
move on to that one.
Many of the elements in this early work you will see refined and explored to a greater
extent later in my career. And you can see by the early ë70s, I was starting to combine
some of the areas of interest. When I started to see that as a total landscape of formsówhere
I could create an arrangement of geometry on the landscape, and make the landscape itself
a component of the work.
You can see that now, itís pink, itís orientated vertical[ly], you can see a bent piece of
glass coming into these very thin layers. There was little or no interest in this kind
of work when I did it. The vessel form: when objects suggested the vessel, there became
. . . a greater interest in my work.
This is one that I feel is important in my work, because it describes my interest in
this architectonic relationship; by architectonic I mean that the form and the structure are
one, you canít separate them. This is one piece of glass, all melted together, where
itís the thick and thin of it creating the structure itself. But again, itís many layers
all programmed together to switch on and off with just the simple introduction of air.
As I work on some of them, I tend to be, I donít know if the word [is] perfectionist,
they seem to go towards an essence that Iím searching for, that I canít define, and the
process defines it. An object like this often terminates that, it seems to be so resolved.
It seems to . . . it doesnít give me a place to go, it sort of answered any questions,
it sort of filled out the envelope for me. This piece was acquired by the Metropolitan
Museum in New York.
This is a very small object, but for me quite beautiful. Itís just a simple. . . itís
a translucent gray, which you can see how the framework, how it describes the form.
You see this verticalóthis is a very early objectóthis vertical orientation I will return
to, and the two planes existing on each side of it, I will return to. This is what I returned
to 10 years later. This I call the Solar Riser series. This piece is in the Museum of Modern
Art in New York. Itís about five inches tall. Again itís the conclusion of a process. There
are several within that [series] that I made and kept. This is another one: you can see
the planes, how they extend beyond the core, the central core of the object. Now, understand
that to make this glass move into form, it had to be up near 1800, 2000 degrees, where
most glass would go to a liquid. But I developed materials and technology that was able to
maintain the structure of the glass. I didnít want to hide that they were actually sheets
of glass. I wanted that to be revealed in the work. I wanted you to look at it and say,
itís just six pieces of glass. Thatís all he did, just, he just fused these together
and bent them; itís as simple as that. And so the beauty, when you get by the technique,
the beauty is just what you see. Thatís all it is to me, just what I look at. I struggle
to figure out how to get there, and I develop all these different ways, but it ends up [that]
itís just what you see.
When I left that farmhouseóMarilyn, my wife, my partner, who sits here with us this eveningówe
moved to a small town, a rural hill town called Savoy, where our daughters Sienna and Scarlet
were born. I built this studio, this is all found material. I bought nails, Iím sorry,
I bought nails for this building. You can see a garage door; if you examine this picture,
you can see other stuff. It looks like I was waiting to put an addition on. But these are
all the materials it took to build this thing. And out of that studio, thereís just a dirt
floor, I got all this weird equipment that I salvaged out of the junkyard, and I built
a studio to be able to make this kind of work.
I started to see objects with the possibility of being thick or thin, that the bottom didnít
have to be the thinnest part, that it could be the thickest part. And that the bottom,
the thick part, could actually be the object itself. That if I introduced other layers
that you could actuallyówhen you looked into the glassóthat you could control the direction
that the observer would see in. That I could influence the way you would look at the work.
That you wouldnít just pick up a work and sort of move around it. It would force you
to look into it, look under it, look through it, look around it. Less like traditional
sculpture, where you would stand on the landscape and walk around an object. You can see, looking
through the opening at the top, so I made a large opening. So, those small ribs on the
side, they are actually clear glass, so that when you look through the opening, you are
looking through the thinnest part of the vessel, at the side, so you see that window of opening.
So, you are not looking from the outside the window, you are looking inside to see the
window out.
These are very early objects, but I thought that theseótogether with what the museum
hasóyouíll know more than enough about my work. This is soda-lime glass. [In] none of
these objects is there more than six or eight cents worth of glass in. There is no monetary
value to the material itself. Itís just gray glass, itís like in the windows of some of
the buildings in the area, the museum ósoda-lime glass, the green glass.
These are other objects; I used three pieces of glass to make this object. You can see
that the center one is the only one that has color, itís blue. When you look at it frontally,
the blue obviously will come through the clear area in the foreground and it becomes a blue
object. I lifted up and created. . . I made it a little smaller, probably because I didnít
have a size I wanted. . . I had no cold-working equipment at the time, and so I used the piece
and I created that space underneath. I flatten the form; Iíll often rotate it, look at it
open-endedly. I donít look at the work as having a top, bottom, or side. I look at them
purely sculptural[ly], out in space. I look at them like my early architectural work that
I created in these frames and space. Itís not unlike that. They end up. . . when theyíre
finished, I rest them on a surface, I have to decide how itís going to be, and in this
case that one became the surface. But I compressed the form very thin because I was intrigued
about how the plane could open and close as you walked around it, or as it moved in front
of you. So I collapsed the volume. Again, this is only three pieces of glass.
I started to look at the. . . trying to control or recognize glass as space, I sort of, I
wanted to identify the surface as an important part, and not looking at the glass as a volume,
as an object, but looking at the surface. The technique that I developed for fusing
glass, and different types of glass that were normally thought of as incompatible, involved
a lot of activity at the surface of the glass, so the surface became an interesting aspect
of the work. And this object is interesting because the surface, the surfaces of each
plane of glass become the dominant element within the form.
Iíll often put several layers of glass together , and they have this certain aesthetic appearance,
but itís often to understand how the bubble moves and progresses through the form. Each
one is a record of the transition of the spherical bubble into that geometric volume. Itís recorded
by those layers of glass. Iíve used layers, and these are rods inside, and the same with
them. These happen sometimes away from me; I do it through observation [so] that I can
start and stop the process, so those lines give me a description of where these materials
are. Realize that this object is glowing red and a lot of these colors and things donít
appear as they would when they are cold. So I have rods and other materials in here that
will glow at a certain wavelength that I can recognize, and see, and imagine what it might
be like when itís finished.
Let me just go back. . . This series that I called Echo Series. I started to put a geometry
I had developed on the interior of the glass. And what we saw as those dark layers on the
bottom, I actually would enclose, encapsulate, certain shapes on the inside. So, depending
on the angleóweíre looking at this in the foreground, it is foreshortened. We are looking
into it and you can begin to see the interior of that. If you were to move down on that
object, it would become completely opaque at the bottom, you would not see those forms
inside of it. Again, [in] the vertical ones, I was able to introduce the bubble element,
the spherical element, I was able to introduce several of them into the form. Again, you
can see that thin hairline, that tracer, that moves through the object.
It was in 1980 that I received a commission for General Electric World Headquarters located
in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. I was asked to do a sculpture for their new atrium, and
I said that I would be interested if I could work in the facility to accomplish it, and
if I could have access to GE worldwide, and they agreed to this. The project took two
years. It was not only mind-altering, it was physically altering. It was a difficult project.
Itís not easy to go into industry, the way I chose to, and to try to do something like
this. But, we did it. Itís stone, glass, and metal. It incorporates all the plastics
that GE developed in the last 60 years.
Thatís me on the far left. I had different parts of the building that I would work in.
At one facility, there were 20 people that I would work with, in others, in the prototype
lab, there were two or three. But usually I was there; Iíd get there early in the morning
and I would leave late at night, for a couple of years, to develop this. There are eight
pieces that make up each side of this, but there are over 40 parts that consume the package
that went in the oven to be able to make it. The red that I developed for that piece. . .I
had cut myself in the process of making it, and I wiped myself with some tissue. And it
was red, it was on the bench, and it was just bleeding, like this red stuff all over, and
I was searching for a colorówhatís this thing going to be? And I said, it will be
the blood, it will be that red. And so I called it ìHemoglobin Redî [Laughter]. In Mount
Vernon, Indiana they made it. They made two tons of this, sheets of this color for me.
They matched it on the colorimeter, they matched the color that I sent them.
The experience of working with that red led to a whole generation of smaller objects when
I was through [with] that commission. I went back and I got some red glass in Europe, and
I began to explore how that could be used. And this I call a Split Riser, itís the vertical
emphasis on my work, that verticality again, but it has that division down the middle.
And here it is in a horizontal relationship of the layers. There is no longer an opening;
the top of the object is completely sealed. All the elements, the geometric elements,
are encapsulated on the interior of the form. This is all fused glass, this is all melted
together, unlike that plastic piece that was laminated, that large piece at GE. This is
all melted together. All the glass works that you have seen are all glasses that are melted
together; for basic purposes, [they are] one piece of glass.
This is another. . . what I did was I put an opaque glass. . . I thought light was arbitrary,
the way objects are lit, the way we see them. Where I would hold it in my hand, and you
have sunlight, natural light, and youíre always getting an orientation to your mindís
eye, or to your eye, relative to a light source. And I thought, while Iím involved with all
these surfaces and elements of the object, I fail to understand the relationship of the
object to the light. So, what it is, is an opaque layer somewhere in the object, usually
in the lower portion, which has an opening in it. Iím sorry, itís not an opening, itís
a clear area, where the light source is below the object. And light penetrates from the
bottom up, so I obscure the surface that itís on. So, to the observer, there is no sense
that thereís light, there is just the ambient light condition. But, there is a light source
below the object. So when I make this work, Iím always thinking of where that light source
is. Where before, I was making a form, and sort of arbitrarily thinking about the light,
I began to think of the light and the object. Again, now, you see those, what they would
callóIíll use a term that people are familiar withóveils, but they are the interfaces between
each layer of glass. You can see that geometry. You can see what was normally the bubble moving
down into the glass. This is the bottom portion, and thereís actually a convex form moving
towards the upper portion.
I was able to control the direction of objects in there, and passageways. These are channels
that move through the object, that actually also describe the movement of the glass when
itís liquid. My equipment is what I call non-traditional glass working equipment. This
is . . . people say, why donít you use my oven, or can you bring your oven to my place?
You know, it costs me $10,000 to move this thing with a flatbed truck and a 10-ton forklift.
It weighs 18 tons. This vessel. . this is a high-pressure vessel. I can put two million
pounds per square inch of pressure on the contents, of whatever I put in here. It weighs
18 tons. It developed the prototype for the Stealth fighter bomber, this one. I got it
from a military surplus company. [Laughter]
With that machine, it let me, let me go back to the experience at GE. That large sculpture
I did for the atrium, it stands almost nine feet tall, which is now at the entry to the
Houston museumóMuseum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texasóthat object. That experience at GE.
. . GE made clear, they laminated, they made impact resistant. . . they called it bullet-resistant
clear glass, often for penitentiaries, or for high security areas, and banks.
So, I was exposed to this laminating technology at GE on that project. After two years of
doing that project, it wasnít just the red, I was. . . I couldnít separate myself from
that experience. I built another studio, which you will see, and I devoted it. . . because
I didnít want to go back in industry [the] way that I had. I created my own environment
similar to what existed at GE, [or] slightly different, and I began to do large-scale glass
laminating.
These are the doors for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where a lot of my objects
have gone into the museum. I think of it now as like, now the objects are the museum. And
I like that. You are not looking at the object: you are in the object, looking out. And I
like that idea.
This is the same piece, looking below it. So, as you walk towards the object, itís
translucent and reflective and it has these ellipsoids inside, and as you move across
it, or move towards it, your sight line changes. And as your sight line changes, the degree
of transparency and translucency changes. So, you see people stop and look, and their
heads are moving back and forth, and itís they themselves interpreting what they see
by where they stand and look at it.
That work, that commission, led to another commission. This is Graham Gundís residence
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and this is his art collection. I designed the entrance to
their residence. You can see on the scale, from where I took the camera, you can see
that the upper portion in the far left [is] purely translucent, and to the right beginning
to be transparent.
Another one, and I think an important aspect of my work is that, since 1980, Iíve been
trying to literally promote my work as impact-, bomb-blast-resistant art work. [Laughter]
And that is the reaction that I get! You know, youíre kidding me! People have no problem
with the art side, but they go, Tom, this bomb-blast stuff, I donít get it. Iíll take
the art, but I donít want the other. I say, you canít separate it, I designed it into
it, and I can design any degree of it.
This is an excellent application. . . now, this piece is actually being relocated. This
is the Mint Museum of Art and Design in Charlotte, North Carolina. Youíre looking at the hallway,
looking into the museum area of it; from the museum side looking out, itís this view.
Itís like my small work, which is bilaterally symmetrical: thereís sort of a side and a
front to the work. Well, itís the same with this, Iíve compressed it even further than
I had before. You know this idea of compressing, compressing, putting all this information,
all this data into a very thin surface thatís all programmed, built into that package. That
thereís the interior museum side, and thereís actually another side, which is the hallway
side. Forbid thereíd be an incident in this museum, itís well protected by this glass
wall. You can also see where Iíve built a gradient; it goes from a darker color up in
the upper corner to a lighter color down on the floor plane. So, people could have a clear
view into the gallery, but I would diminish the bright lights in the upper portion of
it by controlling that glass wall.
This is theóas Tina mentioned earlieróthis is the University Law School at Chapel Hill.
Thereís three, thereís six of these tilted planes, these are fixed in position in the
atrium of the new law school. These are three, and if you are standing at those three and
look across, these are at the opposite side of the atrium. And this is oneóIím not sure
if this one even went into the project, this is a study, a development one, in my studio.
A current project that Iím working on: this is a 67-story building thatísóthe architect
is Architectonicaóthatís going up in Miami, in the Biscayne area, near Cesar Pelliís
Performing Art Center, and it will be across the street from the new, soon-to-be Miami
Museum of Fine Arts. What I designed is the curtain wall for it. Itís 14 stories; itís
the garage, so I designed the louver that encompasses three sides of the building, so
it doesnít need any mechanical ventilation for the garage. The louvers allowóthe percentage
of louver to open space allowsóventilation of the garage. Thereís diagonal orientation
to the sun that wraps, that folds, around the building; it doesnít wrap, it actually,
literally folds around the building. This is a mock-up of it outside of my studio. What
you have here are two planes of glass, and the building will have over 300 of them, going
from two stories above the ground up into the town houses that are on the top of the
garage area and the pool, etc.
So, this talks about the separation between glass as a vehicle to animate light, and to
use that to alter the surface of a 14-story structure. So, glass doesnít exist as an
enclosure to encapsulate a building, but it can be the building itself and change the
skin. And all subject, dramatically, to the environment it exists in, because it will
respond, this glass is designed to respond to the light condition.
This is the node, or the intersecting, between each plane of glass. Each one is over 10 feet
long, they are 18 inches in width. This is an early iteration of a full-scale detail
of where it has light in a gridówhere I had the thin wire in my glass, those lines that
I described the movement of the interior of glass? Here, thereís superimposed a stainless
steel grid of tubing that wraps around the building above the glass.
Iím also developing a series of tables. I thought, how interesting. . . I saw my glass
on my workbench and thatís about. . . when you work with your own material all the time,
and youíre in the studio, you see it in all these different kinds of conditions; you just
couldnít, you canít design it. When you make your own work, itís a completely different
process than ìdesigningî the work. Something else happens: you recognize these sort of
serendipitous opportunities, and I thought that this glass that I had developed was much
more interesting on the horizontal plane than it was on the window plane, when seeing through
it. And so, I thought the table would be a wonderful vehicle for that. So, this is one
table that youíve been looking at. And this table has 50 iterations of changes in shape.
Now Iím up to 50 tables. I enjoy it, and as I make new glasses, Iím always exploring
them as related to the tables.
This is a building in lower Manhattan, near the Village, itís called Morton Square. Itís
an entire city block, and J.D. Carlisle Development gave me the opportunity to be the single artist
for the entire building. So, as you walk down the street, these are the townhouses, and
I did the door, the entry on the door. You can see, let me try this, you can see the
lintelóthereís a piece of glass in there and I did that letter inside, and in the upper
portion, thereís circles and squares and they move down the building. So, as you come
down the street, the glass work starts to unfold. And as people go into their apartments
or use them, they keep illuminating, back-lighting, so the building is very animated.
I designed and provided the glass for the marquis, the entrance, of the building. I
used a glass that works only in reflection. So, I put the lighting in the entrance in
the ground, and pointed it under the canopy, so itís all reflected light. I also did the
side lights as you walk in towards the desk, the lobby desk. I did the lighting in the
desk, and you can actually see the background.
This idea of the mystery of looking at components, of looking at the glass . . . you know, I
look at it, I know that I made the glass, but sometimes I look at it like a stranger,
like itís trying to tell me something, thereís something in there. Although I created it,
thereís so much more to discover and to be understood. I took those concentric rings
that you see in a form like thisóand not consciously, but when you look back at all
of your work. . . when I look back at my studio and I discover these objects, itís not hard
for me to find this relationship between that and this light fixture thatís in the lobby.
This is over six feet in diameter, and it has a wire suspension system thatís built
inside the glass. Each of those cables is one 10,000th of an inch in diameter, probably
less than the thickness of the table cloth. And again as you move around this object,
it will go from translucent to transparent. So, from a distance and almost close up, it
appears to be totally suspended in its space. And you can see the composition now is the
lobby, the desk, the wall, the lighting. This is, if you ever get in this building, and
they would allow you to go in if you let them know youíre there to see the work, they probably.
. . this is on your way to the elevator; this is. . . you will see this construction there,
and thatís about reflected light. Itís the glass, that filter, those diagonals, and the
angle of the light actually push the light onto the surface of the wall. Thatís why
my hand is there, casting the shadow. But itís not so much about the glass as the glass
is a vehicle for the image that is left there.
This is the courtyard; weíre looking down from the upper portion of the building, looking
into the courtyard. I had [the] opportunity on this project to work with Oehme, van Sweden
[& Assoc.], the famous landscape architect from Washington, D.C. I was able to do these
outdoor glass and garden pieces in there. This is one of the smaller pieces; thereís
many throughout the landscape. And the people that have the townhouses, or the people that
have access to that level, have access to the gardenscape.
This is a subway station. Iím going to move along a little more quickly. Iím going to
answer some questions later, but this is another wonderful opportunity about the glass that
I had developed in the ë80s, about the impact-resistance, the bomb-blast protection. Being in a large
public space like this, and itís about glass that reflects and transmits light. In the
condition you see here. . . that condition, that it can be simultaneously reflective and
light transmissive, depending on the angle of the sun and the angle which you view it.
This is the exterior, where you saw that red because. . . the light. You were, like, inside
that object. If you were inside a small-scale work, this is what it would look like. Now
you see it, here, itís this green, itís all mirrorized, itís in reflected light during
the daylight. At night, it will reverse, and it will all be that translucent red, or transparent
red.
Thereís seven triptychs I did, thereís one, two, three. . . over the highway and there
is another one here. These are. . . on this windscreen and on the opposite one over here,
there are seven triptychs, this is one.
Another recent project is the international terminal at the Charlotte airport. There is
a band that moves around the entire gate portion of the terminal. This is a detail of that.
I started having some ideas about space and form and time, that this idea of folding space
or folding time, the inseparateness of space and time, the connectedness. So, thereís
these overlapping, folded surfaces and planes in this, so I call it Flight Dialog. So, as
you move, as people access this space, and move around it or walk through it to get to
their gate or something, this whole space becomes animated, the color changes as you
move by it, shapes change because of the angle you are looking at it.
A lot of this comes from the work that was generated during this period of time. This
is an exhibition. I have two dealers. I have Doug Heller, who represents my work in New
York City, the Heller Gallery. And my other dealer is Serge Lechaczynski, the International
Glass Gallery in Biot, France. This is Doug Heller Gallery, where I was folding planes,
I thought, how to give space more content. I thought that Iíd work a corner of the space,
and if I can occupy two planes, then Iíd influence the space between those surfaces.
So, this is the last exhibition that I had there that illustrates that work.
These are large pieces. Not only did I have to make the glass, I had to build the walls
for this thing. I had to make them, and then bring them down there and reassemble them,
remake them. But, I think it was effective. I think that it was a very important stage
to my work. As I mentioned, it was in 1975 that I brought my work out of the studio because
there was an event in Corning, New York. I had these small objects and someone said,
gee Tom, maybe you should, it looks like youíre having a hard time here, surviving, maybe
if you took some of these objects, you could sell them. I go, really, who do you think
would buy these? They said, well, you just got to get them out there and show them to
people, I think theyíre really interesting. So there was this event at Corning, and I
went and brought a couple of objects, but because I had no cold-working equipment and
because they were just conceptual, they were fragments, they were parts of ideas, I took
some that I thought were more completed than others, but because they were unfinished.
. . when I got here, there was young people everywhere. But, I saw this machinery, and
I was watching these people in there polishing it, and I said, I went to the foreman, and
I showed him this piece of glass that needed some grinding and polishing desperately, and
I said, if I could just do this, I would have this thing finished. And so he said, OK, you
come in here, you sneak in, donít make a lot of noise, and they let me work on the
machine. Lo and behold, I look up, and there were all these students, everyone that was
at this thing starts walking by this window, right, and then Iím out in the group, and
they said, we didnít know they let the workers out and do this thing, and I said, no, I was
just in there working on the piece.
And this is the final slide, the first one, and I would like to thank everyone and especially
Tina for the invitation to be here. Corning does, and will always have, a very special
place deep within my heart. Iím very fond of this. I met two people that started me,
gave me the best impression of what I thought the art world could be like. It was Tom Buechner,
the Director of the Corning Museum of Glass and that famous scholar William Warmus, who
did the book on my work, that I met here, and it all relates back to an event like this,
and I think thatís why Iím here tonight. I havenít done a lot of talks, and I came
here because of that.
Thank you.