Playing with Fire
The Dane Gallery and Corning Museum's Hot Glass Roadshow want to introduce you to a new kind of fireworks
BY MARLI GUZZETTA INDEPENDENT ARTS EDITOR
It's an image you only have to see once before it's seared into your memory - a glassblower harnessing the dangerous power of fire to mold the fragile beauty of glass into a work of art. At once primal and erudite, the process taps into our basest understanding of the earth and our most elevated beliefs about transforming it.

Dane Gallery's Bob Dane shapes glass in his studio. Dane is bringing in the interactive Hot Glass Roadshow this weekend.

"It's like an ancient process - gathering around a fire to watch glass being blown," said Steve Gibbs, who manages the interactive Hot Glass Roadshow for the Corning Museum of Glass, which is coming to Nantucket this week at the invitation of Bob and Jayne Dane.

The Danes co-own The Dane Gallery and agreed that most of their customers are fascinated with the process of glassblowing without ever having seen it in person.

"We hope to build an awareness of the art and craft of glassblowing, so many people have come in here over the years saying, 'How does Bob do this? I'd love to see a piece of glass being done,'" Jayne said.

"One of the most interesting things about glass - and I've been working with it for about 35 years, and I'm still fascinated by it - is its basic alchemy: the fact that glass is earth that's united with fire. That's an oversimplification, but that's pretty much what happens. …When the glassmakers are work- ing, it's like a dance. It's like the glassblowers are dancing around that fire to create beautiful objects."

Bob Dane also compared the process to a "dance." "In terms of working with the material, it's totally different from anything else," Dane said. "Because it's fluid and it's moving, you have to relate to it very spontaneously, and so there's this whole dance that goes on. You're partnering with the glass."

Gibbs added that glassmaking was the first industrial enterprise in North America.

"Four hundred years ago in Jamestown, when the London Company came to Virginia and first set to manufacture something, it was glass," Gibb explained, and added that, globally, glass-making dates as far back as the line between B.C. and A.D., about 2,000 years.

In addition to watching the artists blow gass, visitors to the tent on the corner of North Beach and Easton streets (just down from Lola 41) can bring drawings of their own glasswork design and watch the artists execute them at several times throughout the day.

"If the piece survives through the annealing process, we typically give it to the people that designed it," said Gibbs, who added that curvilinear forms (like animals or instruments) are generally easier to produce than are angular or linear forms (boxes, robots, etc.)

"What makes glass interesting to me is that most pieces of art - portraits, sculptures, etcetera - reflect light, but a glass sculpture reflects and also transforms and transmits light," Gibbs said. "As the light changes throughout the day, those different lighting conditions have a living effect on a piece of glass."

Corning glassblowers will be working at the Roadshow along with local artisans like Bob Dane, Marc Petrovic and Kari Russell, whose work is currently on exhibit in the Dane Gallery this week.

The draw of watching blown glass still has a mysterious pull for the blowers themselves, according to Dane.

"I've been doing this for 30 years," he said."I still want to see

Marc Petrovic make a fish." he said. I

When: Glassblowing and activi

ties at the Roadshow, Fri. - Sun., July 6-8, 10 a.m. - 5 p.m. A "meet the artists" reception at the Dane Gallery, Fri., July 6, 6 p.m. - 8 p.m. Glassblowing lecture at the

Nantucket Atheneum, Sun.,

July 8, 8 p.m.

Where: Tent - Corner of N.

Beach and Easton St (The Mad Hatter Lot); Dane Gallery, 28

Centre St.; Nantucket

Atheneum, 1 India St.

Cost: Everything is free. but

donations are being taken for

the Artists' Association Children's Education Programs

For more information,

please call 228-7779.