Glassblowing

with Ekin Aytac & Joshua Davids
GLASS 681 003 | 3 credits | $350 Lab Fee
August 11 - 24, 2024

This course will cover the fundamentals of glassblowing and is designed to develop a student’s foundational knowledge and skill upon which more advanced ideas can be built. Students will learn to gather hot glass out of the furnace and how to manipulate it with a variety of tools and techniques in both the hot shop and the cold shop. Productive practices including working as a team, timing and choreography, and using natural elements to execute ideas will be demonstrated. This course may include readings from Ed Schmidt’s Beginning Glassblowing and a screening of Glassmakers of Herat. We will investigate glassblowing from a historical approach and look at objects from different periods in history, including works made by Pino Signoretto, Bill Gudenrath, and Karen Willinbrink-Johnsen. Assignments will range from functional cup making, executing complex abstractions, and methods for coloring and patterning. This course will culminate in the completion of a student designed sculpture or installation to be exhibited in the hot shop.

Ekin Deniz Aytac and Joshua Davids are a collective husband and wife team of artists creating glass sculpture. Hailing from Edremit, Turkey and Colorado, USA respectively, this dynamic duo draws from a unique combination of culture, heritage, and experience to elicit profound expression in new works of glass art. Drawing on both modern and ancient mythos as well as their own meditations on the causal relationship between set and setting, the artists weave a new visual tapestry of form, light, and color. Shared interests in the glass medium, architectural and geometric pattern, nature, and narrative help guide the formal elements of their explorations in sculptural objects. In their work, traditional vessel forms are manipulated into unconventional objects used to evoke landscapes viewed from a unique perspective. A variety of hot glass color applications, diamond cutting, and sand engraving coalesce and together represent the visual rhythms of a world we inhabit together.

Ekin Aytac & Joshua Davids, Starscape, Blown Glass, Diamond Cut, Sand Engraved, 18 x 14 x 6