Glass - Glass Blowing Documentary Film Directed by Michael Firus. Produced by Visia Studios

“We are at war with our material…” Thus, we dive into the frantic and poetic word of Healesville Glass Blowing Studio. We follow artists Tim Basset and Guillaume Roux as they do battle with their scorching and enigmatic medium: glass.
Documentary by Visia Studios. For distribution inquiries visit our website: www.visiastudios.com/
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- We're sort of at war with our material.
- Especially in France and Italy, we compare the glass with a woman. You caress the glass.
- It's natural state, once we get it out of the furnace, it wants to be a puddle on the floor.
- We start with the living material. The glass is same consistency as honey.
- We're trying to stop it falling on the floor. One of the things pretty simple to stop it doing that is to keep the pipe turning. From the time we started until the time it finished, it's never been still. Looking out the door at what we've got, it's a really fabulous environment. Each one of them is different. Each one has their own personality. Naturally designs part of our ethos.
- Healesville is on the door of the Yarra Range. Yeah we're in the middle of nature. The birds come to visit us. That's really special to me.
- You can find your inspiration in nature. You can find the inspiration everything's around you basically. So this is maybe the best example of it. Where it took the theme of birds of you can see that's a white cockatoos. The little beak here, and then the eyes, and there you go, you have the cockatoo vase. Now with glass, you need to have a specific plan with all the steps in your heads. Once soon as you start, you can't stop. And then the fun begin. The hardest part of glassblowing it's controlling a big quantity of glass. We play with fire, so play with fire, get burn. I rather deal with heat rather than a million people. Everyone needs to be on the same page and moving in the same time.
- Teamwork's important, that's one of the things I love about it. Often art and craft is very solitary. There's a lot of teamwork in glassblowing. A lot of friendship and camaraderie. It's one of the really great things about it. We spend quite a bit of time making experimental pieces, playing with color, talking about ideas.
- And as well, what is difficult in glass is the combination of color. I know I like to play with contrast or a cold color on a warm color, let's say blue with a red. It all depends what you want to talk about. The further you are from the piece of glass, the heavier it gets. Now for example this piece, it's over five kilos when it's finished. So it's pretty heavy already, just like this. And so you imagine it at the end of the pole. Yeah, this piece just killed me. Right now glass is everywhere around us. From your windows to your phone screen. So I went to the school. I tried cold working and then the hot glass. And that was just a click And I fell in love with hot glass.
- I trained at Monash University, they didn't no longer have a hot glass school. Tilo also also went to the international school of glass or the college of glass in Dudley, in the UK. That school was closed. We both went to RMIT. The hot bar school there, that is now closed. Any arts takes quite a bit of funding. In a university environment, a hot glass shop is probably the most expensive thing they have. Nobody's happy with all the danger inherent in it. And there's very few full fee paying art students. As a business model, I would get rid of the art school. That's an obvious thing to do as a business model. When with our education departments start being business models. Where's our culture gonna go? Either we're gonna be bereft of culture. We're gonna be all the poorer for it. I've worked in hospitality. And we would often blow glass on hire a studio on the weekends. Which was two hours from our house. So we'd get up at six o'clock in the morning, go and blow glass, drive home. I'd jump in the shower with a beer and a scrubbing brush. And I would go and work as a waiter until midnight or one o'clock in the morning. And then come happy, have a few more beers, go to bed, get up at six in the morning, go blow glass again and come back and play the waiter game again. Again, we worked really hard. That's the nature of most people that get something they really want.
- If you're happy about your piece, that's very rewarding and that waves all their fault.
- The material itself is challenging. It's a beguiling mistress. It's fantastic, we love it. That's why we're in the studio. Our best piece is the next one hopefully. We looked to the future a lot. We experiment a lot. It means a lot to us to keep improving.
- Yeah I'm proud of this one.