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Ezra Glass Studio, Kanazu, Japan
originally published in GASNews, Summer 1998

           From June 1-10, following the GAS conference in Seto, I had the opportunity to join together with a group of American and Japanese artists in the inaugural festival of the Ezra Glass Studio in Kanazu, a town on the Japan Sea coast. The participating artists included Pike Powers, Michael Scheiner, Preston Singletary, Tom Farbanish, Einer and Jamex de la Torre, John Leighton, Brian Hirst, the B Team and Daniel Clayman. We ate, work, caroused and - literally- slept together for ten days, which were punctuated halfway through by a weekend festival that opened the studio to the community.
           Ezra Glass Studio is part of the Kanazu Forest of Creation, a prefectural cultural arts center that is subsidized by government funding. The director, Hiroshi Yamano, has patterned the studio and its activities after Pilchuck Glass School, where he has attended as a student and taught as a faculty member for many years. The studio will host visiting artists, produce a line of functional work designed by Hiroshi and the staff, and sponsor events such as the one we participated in.
           Hiroshi and his crew of diligent studio assistants have built an impressively large facility, with four double-ended glory holes supporting four benches, a wide array of annealers, and a tank furnace that must hold 800 Ibs. of glass. Everything in the place was virgin - rack of unused pipes and punties, bins of shiny tools, buckets of unburned blocks.
The daily routine consisted of communal meals, endless haggling over schedules, long days spent in the studio with glassblowing activity as the main focus of attention, after-dinner slides, and nights that flowed with an excess of high spirits. There was even a session  t-shirt.
           While there will be lodging in the future on site, the artists and assistants all stayed at the Grand Nature Campground. The main draw of the campground was a rock-lined outdoor soaking tub that ran hot mineral water. Aside from snoring roommates and the occasional six-inch centipede, it was heaven.
            The artists by and large did their signature work, leaving pieces behind for the forthcoming exhibition hall and making auction pieces. They were assisted in the studio by a handful of Americans that had come for that purpose (that was my nominal role) and by an array of ten Japanese students, one from each of the hot glass programs in Japan. Communication in the studio presented a low hurdle, which was usually overcome by understanding the context of glassworking, or, in a pinch, by hand signs and guttural sounds.
           On the weekend the grounds of the studio were opened to the general public, who attended in massive numbers. There were food vendors and craftsmen selling their wares on site from a tent village set up across from the studio. All of the invited artists demonstrated over the course of the weekend, and that night there was a fundraising auction and a band.
            Some of the invited artists used the studio time to do artistic or cultural exploration, while some held a clinic in glassblowing fundamentals and good habits, which was a nice gesture towards the assistants who had worked so hard for the artists throughout the week.
            On the last day, it was misting slightly and the B Team was making a video of rocketships and aliens under cover of a single umbrella. Most of us were saying good- byes and feeling the energy slowly draining out of the place that had been host to over 2,000 visitors just a few days earlier. I realized again how closely people can come together in a short time only by having to say goodbye.

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