Glass pitchers by Kathleen Andersen. Photo: Kathleen Andersen.
A pitcher’s handle has to fit a hand before a hand can try it. Kathleen Andersen shapes that opening while the glass is still too hot to touch, judging when the loop will be comfortable to hold.
Her pitchers have a compact handle positioned toward the top of the vessel. “I do this for comfort of hold and for the integrity of the piece, and my own personal preference,” Andersen said in an email interview.
The handle arrives late in a sequence of choices about the vessel’s shape. Andersen described gathering layers of clear glass around a starter bubble: “I shape that with a wooden cup that is soaking in water and called a block.”
She adds chips of colored glass to the surface and uses air and gravity to stretch the vessel. “I control the shape during this process with a piece of folded up wet newspaper, it allows me to closely shape and contour the glass while also keeping my hand protected from the heat,” she said.
An assistant gathers glass for the handle, which Andersen attaches, stretches and joins into a loop before widening it, she said. She then heats the opposite side of the lip with a torch to shape the spout.
She puts the shaping time at about half an hour, followed by a slow cooling process in a kiln. But the half hour reflects the speed she has reached after 20 years of working with glass, she said.
The work can still break at the last moment. Her Transfigured pieces began as a way to keep that loss from being the material’s final use.
“I started making these Transfigured pieces to allow those pieces a second chance at life,” Andersen said.
“How I decide what to make with it depends on a few things, how much do I have, is it enough to be its own piece or should I combine it with others to make something new?” she said.
She also tries to keep the remnants’ thickness similar to avoid pulling or stretching that could lead to a break as the glass fuses, she said. “Otherwise I let the colors inspire me into the arrangements.”
“I am regularly surprised by what comes out, sometimes colors change completely, a pink turns yellow, a red will go brown, a white will go clear or what I thought was clear was in fact a red,” Andersen said.
For someone choosing finished glass, Andersen pays attention to whether it sits level and to its color, shape and weight. She also values the chance to speak directly with the person who made it.
“Meeting the artist directly, you can ask all the questions about the inspiration, how it was made, any care it might need,” she said.
A handle’s fit and a remnant’s thickness matter because Andersen wants the finished work to enter someone’s daily life. The pleasure, as she described it, is “art that you use and enjoy!”