Glass sculpture: How shards of glass become fine art
By Angela Lai
The fairies swung happily on the swings. The horses stood proudly. The gymnast swirled her ribbon
around.
These are glass sculptures that people can find in a shop at Causeway Bay.
Cliff Miller is the owner of the shop. He is also one of the few glass sculptors in the world.
People have invited him to demonstrate his skills everywhere during his seven years in Hong Kong. Now he has settled down in his shop to sell his hand-crafted products.
He often attracts a crowd of curious onlookers when he makes glass sculptures.
Mr. Miller explained the difficulty in making glass sculptures."Soft glass is easier to twist and pull in sculpturing. But it requires much care when handling strains on the glass.
"When one part of the glass is heated, it expands, and when it cools, it contracts so much that it causes stress to the near-by unheated glass, which breaks. So it is very important to put the unheated neighboring parts in a soft flame so as to decrease the stress gradient," he said.
Within a minute, he worked two slabs of different coloured glass to red-hot, then fused and pulled them into a heart-shaped arch graduating between two colours.
"The quicker, the better," he said. The glass cooled quickly.
"You have to know exactly what you are making before you start. You cannot stop halfway and wonder how many humps should go on the camel you're making."
Mr. Miller's tools are simply a pair of tweezers, a piece of brass, and wooden clips. He believes that the more tools one uses, the less freedom one has.
So he does not recommend using molds that give leaves of the same size and shape.
Using his tweezers, he flattened a red-hot lump, pressed veins into it, then pulled and twisted it into a leaf to go on the heart-shaped arch.
"Making leaves by hand gives a more humanistic feeling to the glass. The uniqueness is the value."
However, Hong Kong people may have a different value standard. Mr. Miller said, "I don't think customers here appreciate the value and quality of handicrafts as much as they do in Europe.
"They say it is expensive, without realizing that a 50-year experience is put into making perhaps the tiniest fairy sculpture in the world, and there are only a couple of other people in the world can do it."
Mr. Miller will leave Hong Kong for France to devote himself to teaching the skill.
"I will only teach my students the basic technique. The rest is for themselves to discover.
"Even I still need to learn because new techniques keep coming out,"said he.
