process materials, using hand tools, power tools, and/or machinery. Tess: First you need to know how much glass you need at the end of the pipe, too much and the piece will be thicker and heavier than you wanted, too little and it could be so thin it breaks while making it. There’s a variety of metal tools we use to shape the glass, like tweezers to pinch and pull and shears to cut, but one of my favorite tools is actually newspaper. The paper is folded and soaked in water and we use it as basically a glove to shape the glass with our hand. And since the glass is attached to the pipe it needs to break at least once to be separated. One or two breaks is normal for a piece, a third usually means it hit the ground. Gail: As a mosaic artist, I work with glass that a stain glass artist would use. I purchase the glass in large sheets from a wholesaler and then begin the process of taking those large sheets and cutting them down to shapes to be used in a mural or into strips that then can be nipped into smaller pieces to be used in the design of the mural. I use a variety of glues and adhesives depending on the installation parameters. The fi nal step is to grout the piece. I have a variety of tools that I use in the studio also, saws, grinders, and cutters to create specifi c shapes and details for each mural. What is the most challenging part of selecting materials for use based on strength, color, texture, balance, weight, size, malleability and other characteristics? Tess: A wonderful thing about glass is that it can look like almost any other material. There are skilled sculptors who can make glass look exactly like a real banana or a piece of metal. And there are so many ways of working with glass, with casting you can get basically an exact replica of something and with fl ameworking you can get incredibly detailed with it, it’s all about what you need for the piece. But when working hot you can’t really tell how the glass looks until it’s out of the annealer the next day so the most challenging part is the trial process of fi guring out how to make it look just right. Gail Christofferson Gail Christofferson Tess Healey Primary Conew Tess Healey Cake Platter Page 9
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