Star.

Glass has a great tradition about it and there are many ways to work it.

You can cast glass, you can fuse it, you could sandblast it, saw it, grind it, to combine it with other materials or just by itself.

There are ways of using color and or using the surface, the mass or volume of the material and tool.

And create your ideas.

Glass Axis is a non-profit organization that was established in about 1987 by a group of local artists here in Columbus that had no glass working studio to make their art.

What happens once you graduate from school if you want to blow glass?

You need a facility.

You need to place where you can maintain glass at a molten temperature of 22, 2400 degrees.

That's not something you do in your basement.

It's very expensive to start a glass studio yourself, so by having this place for artists to work, they can continue creating art and following their direction.

Glass is a very complicated material and I think for me as an artist, the best thing I can do is work in as many different ways with glass that I can and what this does is expand my repertoire with the material so that when I'm blowing glass I learn certain things about the material that I apply when I am casting it or when I cold working or rhyming it.

Lee Hervey, the board chairman of Glass Axes, has been working on pieces that deal with the concept of time.

The pieces are made by fusing crushed glass into different forms, whether it be a dial face or a pendulum cone, and then combined with other materials, stone, usually.

And they're communicating directly to the viewer to think about.

Different ways of thinking about time, and I think that the glass and the stone sort of echo each other.

I've been around glass all my life.

It's part of my background, it's part of my family.

My father worked for Corning Glass.

And I spent two years in Italy with a master named Livio Siguso.

And he really, he was very strict.

And he changed the way I thought, pretty much.

Mm-hmm.

Made me draw he made me learn to draw because prior to that I really didn't know how to draw and I spent the first eight ten months there just drawing and that changed the way that I worked with glass because I no longer said oh I just want to go and make something I went I said I want to make something specific maybe I won't attain it but I have this goal to reach and I trained me in a very classical way and that was really good because it put discipline into my work.

Christina is working glass differently than most glass blowers.

In fact, she's not blowing glass at all.

She's gathering molten glass on the end of a rod and sculpting it while hot.

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I have an idea when I begin, but that also continues to change.

The material answers me.

I speak to it, it answers, it's an exchange.

I'm director of education for the College of Veterinary Medicine at Ohio State, but my love, my avocation is glass, hot glass, blown glass, slumped.

Right now I'm doing a series of Eskimo masks.

I got interested in doing Eskimos carvings and I was going to form them in glass.

I've made a mold of my face, a death mask of my faced by taking a plaster cast, covering my face with plaster, straws up my nose, it's a very involved process.

Do it with someone you trust.

Then I made a clay positive in that, used the clay positive to make a stronger casting that I could blow glass into.

You're reaching into a furnace and grabbing molten glass at 2,200 degrees.

On the end of a rod about five feet long, steel rod, you very quickly take that to a bench and use tools that are 5,000, 2,000 years old.

There's nothing really new to this.

And you work immediately.

And your contact with the medium, I mean, you can't actually touch it with your hands.

But the tools are such close extensions that it is a very gripping process.

It's a very interesting material.

It's very friendly, but at the same time, you have to play by its rules.

It can have many different looks.

It can be crystal clear, or it can be as opaque as stone.

Actually stronger than steel, but it's very, very fragile.

And it's quite fascinating.