Lino, Lino, Lino!

By Greg Owen, Manager of Audience Engagement and Hot Shop Heroes

Lino Tagliapietra is in town and Museum of Glass is hopping! Lino actually arrived last week and prepared for his residency by making parts. Lino, Jennifer Elek, Erich Woll, and our own Museum of Glass Hot Shop Team of Benjamin Cobb, Gabe Feenan, and Sarah Gilbert, worked together to pull hundreds of feet of cane, which will be used to create the expressive lines in Lino’s pieces this week.

Then, they picked up bundles of cane and made it into various other canes and murrine. Some of the parts were made into long, narrow bubbles, which were then cut apart into smaller sections.

All of these parts will be recombined over the next two weeks. First thing Wednesday morning, Lino laid out patterns of murrine onto a slab of ceramic kiln shelf.

Murrine is the name for small tiles of glass, often with intricate patterns encased inside. Murrine is made by bundling canes together with wire, and then heating them up again and pulling them into more cane, sometimes with a square profile.

Erich Woll is an expert at making these murrine, and he makes nearly all of the murrine that Lino uses.

Once the murrine has been stretched out long and cooled, it is chopped into smaller sections and laid out on a kiln shelf (like the one in the photo above). The entire set up is then reheated and squeezed together. Jennifer Elek is responsible for blending all of those small parts together into a flat disk, which is then picked up on a clear, glass bubble.

Once the piece gets picked up on a clear collar, it is formed into a round bubble and handed off to Lino to work his magic.

To see what Lino makes, tune into the Museum of Glass live feed from 9 am to 3:30 pm, Wednesday through Sunday during the next two weeks.

Greg Owen is the Manager of Audience Engagement and Hot Shop Heroes at Museum of Glass. Greg can be seen working the mic as the Hot Shop studio emcee, assisting Visiting Artists, and teaching soldiers how to blow glass during Hot Shop Heroes: Healing with Fire classes.