Sally Prasch (right), Jay, and Jay's wife, Lee Vanolia
Sally spends much of her week at Syracuse University in her position as a scientific glassblower. The rest of her time she's found working in her personal shop, or collaborating with others around the country—often as an instructor—to bring the magic of glasswork to a wider audience. Sally has inspired Williams glassblowers, now, for several years and is disarmingly friendly. When I arrived in class she was planning Jay's "next honeymoon" with his wife, Lee Vanolia: "A Snow Farm glass class! (And they have such great food there!)"
Today, Sally constructed a glass handbell, footless cordial with arms, a delicate petal seeking a flower, a swan barometer, and a mushroom-in-a-marble pendant that would make Grateful Dead groupies proud. "Can you talk and work at the same time?," asks a student. "Sure." Sally approaches the flame as one might imagine the sculptor approaches a raw stone. "Let's see what this is." Moments later, a 2-inch human form is drawn from a rod of clear glass, running, with hand over forehead. Talking through single motions, a nose is formed, eyes appear, and biceps are formed from stranded muscle. She notes in the same tone she uses to explain her techniques, "He's thinking, 'It's hot in here'." After tens of thousands of hours at the torch and in hot shops, she's worked with many of today's influential artists. "He's so relaxed," she points out about working with one. It seems like a side comment, but really, a relaxed attitude is important to working effectively in this medium. When discussing an embellishment technique, she recollects a time when a master tweaked the approach and it completely fell apart. Failure, of course, is the first step to learning.
In reality, Prasch is, like many glassblowers, a scientist performing experiments in a medium that, after thousands of years of trial and error, frequently yields more questions than answers. The result, of course, is art, but the artist works hard to understand the chemistry and physics that is so important to their success. Seemingly stable objects explode ("It's all about coefficients of expansion. I keep telling him, but he never listens."), true color arrives in glass only as it cools ("The pipe industry has really brought us many great colors.")...Wait, what?! Yes, the Pipe Industry. "When you get to a certain age," she admits, "you decide, having all that smoke in your lungs is not a good thing. But, really, there are lots of great colors now." Sally has a playfulness that makes it hard to believe she spends a lot of her time building scientific instruments. Somewhere in lab, though, there's a glass stopper with an embedded smiley face ("with lots of hair") or an alien. And then you remember, it's all about relaxation.
