I’ve heard it said that glassblowers are often pyromaniacs, or at the very least attracted to danger. In these thickly patterned layers, she forces the viewer to obstruct their own vision, to look but be unable to perceive the entirety of what they are seeing.īlown Away brilliantly captures the immense heat of glassblowing, with sweat dripping from every inch of the artists’ bodies. Each episode presents a new challenge in one, she creates a piece that replicates the layers of a human eye that is losing vision. I find myself drawn to Burns, who shines from the beginning. I cannot look away from the swirls of colours that Andi Kovel, Elliot Walker and Chris Taylor manipulate into mushrooms growing out of plastic-like bottles, a dung beetle, and a Venetian goblet with a convincing sippy-cup lid.
In many ways, glassblowing reminds me of my childhood in rhythmic gymnastics, as the blowpipes and punties become an extension of the body. No matter their primary skills, watching these artists work is like watching athletes. These contestants – one of whom is eliminated in each episode – represent a range of styles and years of experience among them are skilled sculptors and fabricators, a production glassblower and a flameworker who works with smaller, non-blown hot glass. This season – the second – was open to artists from across the world, and includes Australian artist Tegan Hamilton, Nao Yamamoto from Japan and underdog Cat Burns from New Jersey. While host Nick Uhas has a lot of time for puns, he avoids the sexualised vocabulary of glassblowing – glory hole, jacking, flashing, just to name a few – and I appreciate that the show focuses more on artistry than on innuendo. The first episodes explain some of the basics of glassblowing but leave the process mostly a mystery to viewers. The Blown Away hot shop is 10 times bigger, with all the visual drama of artists swinging blowpipes like pendulums, flames exploding seemingly out of nowhere and assistants in protective suits running towards the annealers. This is what I learnt in one ordinary hot shop.
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Finally it is cooled down slowly in an annealer, because it will crack or explode if left to cool at room temperature. To create an opening – perhaps for a vase or a drinking glass – the hot glass is transferred onto a punty, a non-hollow rod. Glass is shaped in arcane processes – rolled mesmerisingly back and forth on a steel bench, blown through the blowpipe, or shaped with wooden paddles or wet newspaper.
There’s a circus-like enchantment to how this molten substance is gathered out of a furnace onto a hollow blowpipe and manipulated until it becomes something solid. The smashes make me flinch in my armchair. “Glass will smash, and so will your dreams,” says Gray, as she introduces 10 artists to the competition. As it cools, it is as fragile as the temper of a toddler. At times, it is as freefalling as honey from a dipper or as stretchy as hand-pulling ropes of taffy. As resident judge Katherine Gray suggests, its manifestations are limitless.
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A few weeks after I watched the first season of Blown Away – a Netflix reality TV show based on competitive glassblowing – I thought I should try glassblowing at least once in my life.įor some, Blown Away might be just another artsy competition reality show – The Big Flower Fight and Forged in Fire come to mind – but for me it is so much more. I didn’t mean to fall in love with glass.
