Unlike metals, that at a certain temperature melt or set, glass passes through various levels of malleability slowly softening until it becomes mouldable. Jeff Zimmerman (Ft. Knox, Kentuky, 1968) is in a class of his own in the art of glassblowing. Some will have seen his pieces last October on show in London for Design Art London at the R 20th Century gallery stand. We met up with him in Milan. Edited by Giulia Guzzini.

How did your passion for glass come about?
Jeff Zimmerman: While I was studying Anthropology at Santa Barbara in California, kind of by chance, I took a glassblowing course. It came naturally, I learnt quickly and I carried on during the summer, doing courses at the Pilchuck School in Seattle, learning traditional techniques alongside great masters like Lino Tagliapietro and Pino Signoretto. Glassblowing is hard, it’s a kind of meditation where you have concentrate very hard and not think about anything else, I was amazed by it and I was very concentrated in what I was doing.

While you were studying you also worked with artists…
J. Z.: Yes, Maya Lin, Kiki Smith and Ann Hamilton were invited during the summer programmes and they talked to us about their approach to using glass as a means of expression. After that I worked in France and met Robert Wilson and Gaetano Pesce.

In the 1990s you were part of the B team, an experimental group influenced by Dada and punk rock that expressed themselves combining practice with performance in working with glass…
J. Z.: It all started in 1993, when I joined the group after meeting the founders Zesty Meyers and Evan Snyderman, students at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and I stayed until it broke up in 1998. We did happenings at university campuses, getting the students involved and combining theatre, performance and installation and giving practical demonstrations about working with glass. We did a tour in 1997 and took part in the Fringe Festival at Philadelphia and showed at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

Then you started working on your own. How do your pieces come about?
J. Z.: Sometimes I start with a drawing, an idea comes to me and I make a sketch but more often I draw directly with the glass. When I’m working in my studio in Brooklyn I look at the shape and react to how it’s developing. I don’t start with drawings but always think in three dimensions. For the Morphos series for example, what I did was pull the glass when it was hot and malleable and you can really control it, and then just used some simple line guides. As a result each piece is different from the rest.

In its pure form, glass is transparent, colour is an important aspect of your work though. Is that so?
J. Z.: Yes, definitely. Coloured glass is beautiful, so warm. While I’m blowing the glass, the colour gets added a bit at a time so I can decide how intense or bright it is. I pay a lot of attention to the exact amount of colour that determines the shade. I like playing with the amount of pigment, for example light blue diluted with water or oil gives a soft light and leaves the white showing through from below. I use the density of the whites to give different qualities of luminescence that can be more opaque or more translucent. My pieces are all white but there is colour hidden inside. In this lamp I used baking soda, I added it to produce the holes on the surface of the lamp and at the same time it made a blue and orange detail. Its like drawing, I proceed by experiment, I start making one thing and I let it grow. The way I draw with glass is the same way that things grow in nature, the mistakes become part of it. Trees are always perfect, there are no wrong trees.

You just mentioned nature, in what way is it a reference for your work?
J. Z.: I don’t want to be literal about it, I don’t want to represent nature but I think I start from the idea that the process of blowing glass is a bit like a frozen moment in nature. The way that stalactites and stalagmites are created: you start with a liquid that then solidifies. It’s a phenonomen, rather than a natural form that inspires my work. It makes sense to say that it’s the way that nature designs. There are things in nature that are just more accurate, almost like magic, like soap and soap bubbles, the colours and the forms they make always seem perfect to me. I have been working with glass for twenty years, I know how hard it is to achieve things and in some cases I go outside my boundaries to create them and I get there through experiments, sometimes starting with conceptual references, like in this piece where the candles become snakes. I work along two tracks: making on the one hand and conceptual processes on the other and the piece is the result of a combination of the two.