Glass-working art part of retired Indiana teacher's roots
WOLCOTTVILLE, Ind. (AP) - After spending more than 40 years in the classroom teaching, Joan Bovee is once again a student.
The retired family and consumer science teacher now spends her days crafting glass, a substance she has loved since she was a child.
Bovee grew up part of a glass-making family. Her mother, her uncle, her grandfather all worked in the central Indiana's glass industry.
In fact, it may have been a trip to the glass plant when Bovee was around 7 years old to visit an uncle who was working making bottles that started her love of all things glass.
"My uncle was on the line one day, and I was just amazed at how it worked," she recalled of her trip to his factory. "And he said, 'Here's long tongs, you pick it off,' and I picked a piece off the line. They were doing some type of bottle work, and I pulled a bottle neck off and set it down. He said, 'You know, we can move this around, we can make something different.'"
Her uncle quickly manipulated and stretched that hot piece of glass, making it more a work of art than a glass bottle neck. It's a moment Bovee has never forgotten. She still has both pieces of glass carefully preserved on top of a cabinet in her home's kitchen.
"I was so impressed," she recalled.
Glass manufacturing came to Indiana in the 1880s after the discovery of a huge deposit of natural gas. The discovery of that gas brought entrepreneurs and developers alike from around the world to Kokomo and central Indiana.
One industry to first flounder and later flourish was the Opalescent Glass Works company, later to be renamed the Kokomo Opalescent Glass Co.. It sold tens of thousands of pounds of sparkling, colored glass to L.C. Tiffany. The Kokomo Opalescent Glass Co. remains in business today.
Bovee started dabbling in glass in 2007 when she and her brother, both retired, decided to retrace their roots, so to say, and learn more about the glass industry their family had been such a part of.
"My mother was a glass worker, and when my brother retired from teaching, he said, 'C'mon Joan, let's go see what mother was doing, and let's try it. So the pair made a trip to Kokomo and signed up for a glass-making class. They even bought glass-crafting equipment and started making glass items.
Since then, Bovee has added dozens of more glass classes and talked with hundreds of glass workers and craftsmen, hoping to learn all she can learn about this most ancient of arts.
Glass can be an extremely difficult material to work with. Bovee said mistakes are common and, perhaps, one of the things that make working with it exciting. Working with glass means you have to learn to accept things don't always come out as planned.
"You have to be pretty accepting, because there are so many mistakes you can make," she said. "Mistakes can be a happy accident, because you can go: OK, I can redo this or say it's good the way it is. There's a happy mistake in my gallery, and a lot of people look at it and say it's amazing, and I just shrug."
Glass comes in dozens of varieties and colors, and not all glass is the same.
"Each color has a mind of its own, and it does its own thing" Bovee explained. "Not all glass is the same, and some types of glass don't play well with other types of glass."
Glass can be formed and manipulated using several different techniques.
"There's blowing glass, and there's molding of glass, casting of glass, there's flame work, and then there's flat glass work," she said. "I'm doing the flat glass work, because that's the least expensive to get into."
Her basement workshop is filled with plates and tubs of brightly colored and magical-looking pieces of glass.
After learning the basics, Bovee installed a glass kiln in her basement and built her glass shop around it. Her kiln is electric.
"It uses no more electricity than a dryer," she said.
So is her glass work art?
"I don't know," she answered. "There's a fine line between art and craft, and this is a skilled craft, but it's also an art form. You can do so many different things with it creatively. I call it a passion that I just do."
No matter what form glass takes, Bovee said it's worth displaying. She's set up a gallery, called the Hickory Island Gallery, that displays both her art and the art of more than 20 other artists in her rural Wolcottville home.
"When I look at a finished piece," she said, "I know that someone has done a lot of intense work and they care about it, and they molded it, and they've been willing to accept imperfections and are able to correct what they think are mistakes."
___
Source: KPC News, http://bit.ly/2tdBCSq
___
Information from: The News-Sun, http://www.kpcnews.com