Glass Craft In Collaboration with Glass Sutra

Glassblowing is a cluster craft of Muradabad, Agra. It was introduced to India by the Persian emperors. It still is a significant sector in Agra. Over thousands of families survive on glass blowing for their livelihood. I tried my luck going to Muradabad to find someone to work for me it was all in vain as they took up only production based work which was to be done in bulk unless they had contacts in the industry. Also, it wasn’t easy to communicate as they had very complicated names for each tool they were using and I was unable to guide them. After a few failed attempts I tried asking around for glass blowers in Delhi and found a few artists and contacted them as I was looking forward to this mostly because my wooden earrings didn’t work out.

One of the companies I had contacted was Glass Sutra,they offered me a personal meeting with Reshmi Dey, founder and creative head of Glassutra in Delhi, After the meeting I was quite motivated to be working with glass as she gave me a good demonstration and confirmed that, my ideas we "doable". She advised me to bring sketches for the next meeting for better communication with the artisan.

It was a challenge to work with the artisan to convert my 2d sketches to 3d glass object, as we couldn’t judge the depth of the piece in the drawing. After realising the communication gap, I tried making a prototype with GI wire which was a success but lacked the weight of

the glass; therefore final prototypes were developed with clay which solved most of the major problems. Nevertheless, it was almost never that we had the same thing, as the sketch merely acts just as a guideline for the artisan to recognise the shape and form. Most of the time it was just ideas that happened from the previous piece made, and I was positively happy with the outcome.

During the making, we tried to make holes on the sides to be able to make them wearable as earrings and to plan the engineering bit of the jewellery.I had no idea of how to put it together as one piece. However, the holes did help Wai Yan Choi to fixate the metal.