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In Fragments is an exploration of Life Art
Created by Jonathan Jennings Harris
    Ritual 11
    A ritual to source and prepare the ingredients to make local glass from scratch
    • Essay
    • Reflection
    • Pictogram
    • Tools
    • People
    • Places
    • Music
    • Stills
    • Credits
    View film (17:20)
    “The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It is the people who do all the work all the time who eventually catch onto things.”
    — John Cage, 10 Rules for Students and Teachers

    After more than twenty years of working with glass, including a time of study on the island of Murano in Venice, Ethan Bond Watts had never heard of anyone making glass completely from scratch, using naturally gathered materials. Glass artists typically begin with “cullet” — recycled bits of glass from former creations that can be remelted with relative ease.

    Classical glass by Ethan Bond-Watts (2010)

    To make glass directly, three primary ingredients are needed:

    1. Silica (SiO2) — to create the basic structure of the material
    2. A “flux” such as potassium carbonate (K2CO3) — to lower the required melting point of the silica
    3. Limestone (CaCO3) — to increase the hardness of the resulting glass

    These ingredients are typically sourced in bulk from industrial suppliers to guarantee their purity. Once sourced, they’re usually heated in a high-powered propane or electric furnace to reach the temperatures required for the so-called “glass transition” to occur (2,500+ degrees Fahrenheit). This complexity makes the prospect of manual glass-making essentially quixotic, and so it is rarely attempted.

    Beyond the quest for glass itself, this ritual was also a way for me to become acquainted with the physical realities of life at High Acres Farm. For most of my adult life, I’d worked within the global “idea economy” as an “Internet artist” of “data visualization” and “interactive storytelling.”

    • Old tools — Herhúsið, Iceland — 2010
      Björn Valdimarsson

    I’d never really worked with physical materials before — never driven a tractor, never used a chainsaw, never swung a maul. Through my work with Ethan, I was learning not only the creation of glass, but also the ways of being a Vermonter.

    New tools

    In this ritual, we set out to gather the various ingredients from around the local landscape to make our own glass completely from scratch, including building our own hillside furnace made of clay cob from the surrounding fields.

    Cob

    To gather clay, we dig a series of test pits in the meadows of High Acres Farm.

    Searching for clay

    We use a wheelbarrow to carry the harvested clay to the stables.

    Preparing for cob

    We mix the clay with water, gravel, and straw to create cob mixture to be used for the walls and doors of our future furnace.

    Making cob

    Potash

    To gather potash, we use a two-man band saw to fell a dead tree, a chainsaw to slice it up into sections, and an axe and a maul to split it into logs.

    Felling a tree

    We make a bonfire to burn my mother’s private paperwork — her divorce agreement from my dad, her medical records, her marked up books on psychiatry, and other sensitive documents that my sister and I felt should be destroyed.

    Making a fire

    We harvest ashes from the dying bonfire with a wooden sieve.

    Gathering ashes

    We dissolve the ashes into water, then pour the settled water through a series of smaller plastic sieves, so that only the liquid solution remains.

    Refining ash water

    We use a propane turkey boiler to evaporate the liquid solution, in order to isolate its potassium carbonate (i.e. potash) to use as our flux.

    Making potash

    Silica

    To gather silica, we visit the “scree fields” of the nearby Bristol Cliffs Wilderness to harvest Cheshire Quartzite — the mineral with the highest concentration of silica found anywhere in Vermont.

    Gathering quartzite

    We take a few large chunks home in a red backpack.

    Future powder

    Back at High Acres Farm, we enter the old shed.

    Red white and blue

    We build a crushing station using pieces of plywood, centered around my grandfather’s heavy steel anvil.

    Collection chamber

    Using my grandfather’s steel sledgehammer, I start to pulverize the quartzite.

    Sledgehammer
    Crushing quartzite

    We crush the quartzite even further with an old steel tamper bar. We pour the resulting powder through a funnel and through a set of plastic sieves to isolate its finest particles, ending with a granularity of 300 mesh — which is now our silica.

    Tamper bar
    Refining silica

    Limestone

    To gather limestone, we visit the Shelburne Quarry on a quiet Sunday afternoon and harvest a few small jar-fulls of powder from atop their giant mounds.

    The Shelburne Quarry
    Local limestone powder

    Fuel

    Certain other steps are not shown in the film — notably the lightning strike that destroyed the nearby “Old Dairy Barn” at Shelburne Farms.

    • A barn burns — September 11, 2016
      Burlington Free Press

    The barn housed a collection of local lumber that was blackened and largely destroyed by the fire, but much of it we salvage for fuel to feed our furnace.

    The burned barn’s melted copper roof
    Gathering wood

    We split the wood by the High Acres Farm shed, and stack it into a pile on the sloping hillside at the site of our future furnace.

    Cutting firewood
    Future fuel

    All together, these steps took around seven months to complete.

    • With Ethan at the end of Apprenticeship
    Performed in 2016
    View film (17:20)
    Download text (PDF)
    • Apprenticeship
      On gathering power
      Published Apr 5, 2022

    Two triangles meet and converge — the smaller one pointing up into the larger one, forming a new empty space in the mutual center.

    • Blue Jeans
      In 3 rituals
    • Blue Sieves
      In 2 rituals
    • Blue Torch
      In 2 rituals
    • Camera Kit 1
      In 21 rituals
    • Chain Saw
      In 1 ritual
    • Clay Cob
      In 2 rituals
    • Fire
      In 9 rituals
    • Glass Sheets
      In 22 rituals
    • Glass Stand
      In 22 rituals
    • Lake Water
      In 11 rituals
    • Limestone
      In 2 rituals
    • Plastic Funnel
      In 3 rituals
    • Plastic Goggles
      In 2 rituals
    • Potash
      In 2 rituals
    • Red Bag
      In 1 ritual
    • Red Coat
      In 2 rituals
    • Silica
      In 4 rituals
    • Steel Anvil
      In 1 ritual
    • Steel Axe
      In 1 ritual
    • Steel Bucket
      In 5 rituals
    • Steel Maul
      In 1 ritual
    • Steel Pail
      In 5 rituals
    • Steel Saw
      In 1 ritual
    • Steel Shovel
      In 3 rituals
    • Steel Sledge
      In 1 ritual
    • Wheelbarrow
      In 3 rituals
    • White Clothes
      In 14 rituals
    • White Gloves
      In 3 rituals
    • White Paint Pen
      In 22 rituals
    • Wood Matches
      In 5 rituals
    • Wood Sieve
      In 1 ritual
    • Jonathan Jennings Harris
      In 23 rituals
    • Ethan Bond-Watts
      In 4 rituals
    • High Acres Farm
      In 24 rituals
    • The Fields
      In 7 rituals
    • The Hills
      In 5 rituals
    • The Shed
      In 4 rituals
    • The Stables
      In 7 rituals
    • The Woods
      In 6 rituals
    • Apprenticeship
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      • MP3

      Download all stills from “Apprenticeship” (37 MB)

    • Created by
      Jonathan Jennings Harris
    • Edited with
      Scott Thrift
    • Original music by
      Julio Monterrey
    • Filmed at
      High Acres Farm
      • Featuring
        • Ethan Bond Watts
      • Additional photography
        • Ethan Bond Watts
      • Quartzite harvest filmed at
        • Bristol Cliffs Wilderness, Bristol, VT
      • Limestone harvest filmed at
        • Shelburne Limestone Quarry, Shelburne, VT
    Next
    • Essay 12
      Phase Change
      A ritual to make glass using the cremated remains of my mother
    In Fragments is an exploration of Life Art.
    • Intro
    • FAQ
    • Genealogy
    • Images
    • Music
    • Credits
    • Contact
    In Fragments is an exploration of Life Art
    Created by Jonathan Jennings Harris