Group Exhibitions

Making Ideas: Experiments in Design at GlassLab
Corning Museum of Glass
Corning, New York
May 19, 2012 – January 6, 2013

Curated by Tina Oldknow, Curator of Modern Glass

Images Courtesy of the Corning Museum of Glass

Curated by Tina Oldknow, Making Ideas highlighted over 150 design prototypes from nearly 50 international designers who participated in the museum’s GlassLab design program. The exhibition celebrated glass not only as a material, but as a medium for collaboration, innovation, and process-based exploration.

Our contribution to Making Ideas was a vitrine installation featuring a decade’s worth of glass experiments made in collaboration with the Museum. Many of the pieces referenced war iconography—glass bombs, grenades, and sticks of dynamite rendered in clear, molten beauty. Among them was our Grenade Calendar, the first object we ever made at Corning in 2007. We had already been exploring the grenade form in other materials, like beads and textile, but seeing it realized in hot glass was transformative.

We embedded typographic numbers into the freshly blown glass using vintage letterpress type, turning the surfaces into  shimmering, iridescent timelines. A master glassblower we worked with at the time commented on the  unexpected resemblance of our finished pieces to Tiffany glass, with aurora-like metallic reflections dancing across the surface. This  was the only grenade calendar we ever made in glass, and it remains one of the most powerful collaborations of our career.