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HQ TRADE MAGAZINE APRIL 2016 86 “I had to do all the dirty work, and pay my dues before I got to the furnace,” he says. “At the end of the day I got to scrape together all of the frit that was left on the marver table, so all the pieces from my original body of work all had miscellaneous colors or whatever color the main guy was using that day. It did help me. . . it gave me the opportunity to create something out of whatever I had to work with.” Hurley's friend Drum, at African Ash Glass, was the first to introduce him to pipe making. Back then it was all experimental. “This was when Northstar only had about five colors out, and it was before any of us knew anything about scientific work,” Hurley says. “We know about working off point, so we'd work off of 25mm tubing and cut it into thirds and work off that. Kilns, back then, didn't have bead doors so it was almost like a race to the kiln before the piece broke – we didn't understand flame technology or glass theory, so I really taught myself how to do bubblers and welds and evolved on my own.” “We'd go to reggae shows or barter fairs, and see other people's work, and be like 'Whoa! How'd you do that!?' but they wouldn't tell,” he adds. “The glass community is a beautiful thing now and its evolving into more of a sharing thing – it took us a long time to get any recognition from the art world, and so now that we're getting that acceptance, I want to make all the information available so that we can really explode as a movement even more into the mainstream art world.” “At this point in the movement, you can't not notice us – we have great techniques and execution, and we're a bunch of growing artists who are really learning how to present our art. It's a great time for boro.” Hurley is best known for his old school Italian work – he studied Venetian style and has developed a skill at crafting fragile pieces. Hurley's thesis, you might say, was on the goblet, which he considers one of the most challenging pieces because of its multiple points of alignment. That has led him to explore the possibilities of functional glasswork, melding artistic techniques with apparatuses. “I'm really intrigued by the functionality that we have to offer the glass medium,” Hurley says. “I feel like I'm at the union of art and science.” continued on page 98 Glass Blowercontinued