'Aunt Gladys' to bring live glassblowing demos to Jackson on Saturday

On Saturday, uptown Jackson will be transformed by the fifth February Annual event, Glass Alive.

Court Street will have food trucks and a festival atmosphere — and Aunt Gladys II.

She’s a mobile glassblowing studio, complete with furnace, glory hole to reheat the work between stages, annealing oven to evenly cool the glass, and fuel tanks to keep the fires roaring.

The molten glass will be heated to about 2200 degrees Fahrenheit, said Nadine Saylor, a glass artist and Southern Illinois University-Carbondale lecturer.

The fuel tank she and her students are bringing weighs in at 250 pounds, Saylor said.

This undated image shows a detail of "10,000 Breaths," an art project by glass artist Nadine Saylor.Courtesy of Nadine Saylor

“We don’t use that much gas, but the pressure we need has to come from that bigger tank,” she said, adding the one-day event will likely use about one-third of the tank.

Saylor discovered glassblowing, in which a bubble of molten glass on the end of a pipe is blown with the artist’s breath and formed into shapes, during her final year in college, she said. She’d been working in stained glass, and her hands were covered in cuts.

“Someone was doing something in one of the kilns, slumping something they blew,” Saylor said. When she asked what that meant, the other person told her about glassblowing.

“It was such an orange glowing, hot liquid lava material. I was just so enthralled by it,” Saylor said.

She made room in her schedule to learn glassblowing, graduated a semester late, and the rest is history.

This undated image shows a detail of "10,000 Breaths," an art project by glass artist Nadine Saylor.Courtesy of Nadine Saylor

Saylor has lectured at universities nationally and internationally, earned awards including Glass Artist of the Year in Cincinnati, and taught workshops.

But on Saturday, she’ll be demonstrating glassblowing with some of her SIU students, she said.

“It’s like patting your stomach and rubbing your head,” Saylor said of the glassblowing process. “There are so many steps, all at once. It’s really hard to get the hang of always turning the rod once it gets glass on the end. You can’t stop once you get started. Otherwise, the piece gets off center and hard to work with.”

She deals in different subject matter, as well, she said. She creates domestic objects, such as vases and bowls, that contain imagery or concepts of her surroundings in Southern Illinois.

One project, “10,000 Breaths,” saw her creating thousands of baseball-sized iridescent glass bubbles.

This undated image shows a detail of "10,000 Breaths," an art project by glass artist Nadine Saylor.Courtesy of Nadine Saylor

About 2,000 of those “bubbles” are displayed in the former Ross Furniture building at 116 S. High St. in Jackson.

Some jewelry pieces Saylor has made, and some whiskey glasses and wineglasses, will be available for purchase at Cobblestone Corner, she added.

Craig Milde of the Uptown Jackson Revitalization Organization’s design committee said Saturday’s event is about building an art experience.

The design committee’s initial planning included discussion of blown glass, first suggested by Susan Hahs, and, Milde said, he remembered hearing about a mobile glass studio.

“This isn’t about stained glass or jewelry,” he said. “This will be a live demonstration of the whole process.”

The 2019 February Annual featured Roy Thomas — a comic book writer, former editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics and Jackson native — in a departure from previous February Annual celebrations. Those had been more traditional, gallery-based art celebrations, Milde said.

Branching out in 2019 brought in nearly 1,000 people, Milde said.

“I think this year, we’re creating an experience,” he said.

The German Cook, Christian Voigt, will be serving up his fare, Milde said, and other food trucks will be on site as well.

Milde has worked with blown glass before, he said.

“When working the glass, you only have about 20 seconds,” he said. “Unlike other creative processes, you have to have all the steps and moves in your mind, all very orchestrated and coordinated.”

Milde said one main artist will likely be working, with two or three assistants nearby to help.

“Hand-eye coordination is key,” Milde said.

Live glass-blowing demonstrations will be performed from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturday on Court Street in uptown Jackson, inside a tent near the courthouse lawn. Admission is free.

The Cape Girardeau County History Center will host a glass exhibition.

For more information, visit www.facebook.com/UJRO1 and www.facebook.com/auntgladysII.

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