Christopher Poletto of Crucible Creations
About the Artist:
A spark of creativity creates the flame that ignites a passion. Christopher found glass intriguing and began collecting pieces during his world travels in the 1990s. His interest in glass art led him to visit Venice and observe Murano's famed masters at work. Early forays into stained glass soon gave way to the allure of working with hot
glass. Crucible Creations was born in 2008 when Christopher adapted a pottery studio into a glass studio. Lampworking uses high temperature flames to melt, shape, and sculpt glass. Two types of glass are commonly used in art glass: soft (soda ash) and hard (borosilicate). Soft glass is commonly used for beads and paperweights. Hard glass, requiring higher temperatures than soft to shape, is the same type of glass introduced as Pyrextm by Corning in 1915. Christopher uses the heat and chemistry of his flame to manipulate colors achieved using oxides of several metals including cobalt, cadmium, silver, and copper. Sometimes pure gold or silver is fumed onto the glass for special effects. A biomedical engineer and neuroscientist, by training, Christopher's scientific background complements the interplay of physics, chemistry, and creativity that lampworked glass art requires. Although he is new to the craft, his hybridized approach to the art has resulted in technique innovations prompting thirty-year veterans to exclaim “How did you do that?”
