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Glassblowing by hand might seem like a dying art, yet it is thriving: Studios and universities offer popular classes, and glass art is widely exhibited and sold. Amateur and professional glassblowers alike are captivated by the choreography of fire, smoke, and molten material. Why are people drawn to this ancient craft? What is distinctive about the social, physical, and intellectual experience of glassblowing? How does the body learn an art?
In Fire Craft, Erin E. O’Connor interweaves an immersive firsthand account of her experiences learning to blow glass with a sensuous ethnography of embodiment and community among glassblowers. Through compelling stories, such as her struggle to produce an elegant goblet, she shows how a novice becomes hooked by and committed to a craft. Reflecting on embodied knowledge, O’Connor considers how we negotiate mistakes and failures, how we strive to develop proficiency in the face of shortcomings, and how through making objects we make meaning. She also explores the history of glassblowing and how various social, environmental, and knowledge frameworks shape the valorization of craft. From the furnaces of empire to the hot bodies of collaboration and love, O’Connor reveals the interconnectedness of the body with the elemental world. A gripping tale of the social world and experience of glassblowing, Fire Craft passionately defends practical labor as intellectual work that changes self and society.
— Camilla Groth, coauthor of Craft and Design Practice from an Embodied Perspective
This book makes a unique and important contribution to our understanding of craft and embodied knowledge. O’Connor’s long apprenticeship as a glassblower has endowed her with firsthand knowledge and expertise, and her careful reflections on her personal learning trajectories as a maker enrich both her ethnographic storytelling and theoretical analyses.
— Trevor H. J. Marchand, author of The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work: Craftwork in Twenty-First Century England
What emerges from the rich, textured data is an argument about culture itself, one that takes craft as both metaphor and model.
— Claudio Benzecry
Interesting and offer[s] fresh insights.
Readers interested in art, labor, material culture, or the politics of making will find a book that is both incisive and fully alive.
O’Connor is excellent at showing how glassblowing turns bodies into instruments, with benches, pipes, furnaces, and glory holes all locked into a demanding choreography.
Preface
Introduction: Arriving at New York Glass
1. The Glassy State: Setting the Pot of Man and World
2. Embodied Knowledge: The Ebbs and Flows of Skill Acquisition
3. Fire and Sweat: Calorific Bodies and Teamwork
4. Blow: Time, Space, and the Vessel
5. Quintessential Craft: Cup Making and the Turns of Mêtis
6. Materia Erotica: Love and Strife in the Hotshop
Conclusion: Heart of Glass
Acknowledgments
Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Index