Glass

I started in a 10th-grade class at St. Paul’s, taught by Nanda Soderberg, a working glass artist who now teaches at UrbanGlass. Five hours a week at the bench, and for most of that term I was bad at it.

I had arrived in the United States in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, on my first international flight, alone. Three years went by before my mother saw the campus. My English was four years old, counting from when I learned the alphabet, and the rules against gatherings left few chances to practice it.

I hadn’t liked art in Japan and wouldn’t have taken any without the graduation requirement. Glassblowing was on the list. I had never heard of it offered as a class, and I signed up before I chose my calculus section.

The studio turned out to be the one room where I wasn’t behind. Nothing there counted how often I spoke in a discussion I couldn’t follow, or how well I argued a thesis I hadn’t understood. It counted the hours I put in and how the piece came out. Soderberg built that room, mischief included.

I stayed bad at it for a long time, burned or cut most weeks, often enough that the health center staff learned my name. I kept going anyway, well past the five class hours. Soderberg gave me a special recognition at the end of the term, and I kept coming back most weeks for two years after.

Glass never needed English. It comes out of the furnace amorphous and takes whatever colour and form you give it, and for a while that was the most direct way I had of putting something across. What I make now is small and specific: an attempt to keep the minutiae of a life. Memory is ephemeral. Glass is not. A piece is a moment I can pick up.

I build systems that turn brain activity into language for people who cannot speak. I know where that comes from.

The pieces below are from the bench: finished work shot against white, the same work out in the world, and the hot shop where it was made.