Rama

Vidar Koksvik  
It’s truly a magical material. And, people have been making things out of glass for over 5,000 years!   
 
It’s been important for me to look at the traditional. And to get both technical and stylistic references from there. But also, to give it a contemporary expression. 
 
I wear many hats…  I’m a glassblower, a glass designer… I also call myself a glass artist, a curator, and I work with decoration. I work with chandeliers, wine glasses and drinking glasses, and… I like doing all these things.  
 
When I started at Glass School, I thought… I would go to the Glass School for six months and then go home to Norway and start a glassblowing hut. A few days later I realized – “OK… this is going to take time, and I want to learn this properly!”. Now, it’s 30 years later and I'm still there! – I want to learn more, and learn it properly.  
 
So, this thing with the technique has been a driving force all along and is important for me both to... acquire a sense of mastery, to use a cliché. But also, to give me the freedom to make what I want, and work with the expressions I want.  
 
Most of what I’ve done has been inspired by traditional Venetian, cane technique – that is, pulling long rods of glass. But in this case, it's a combination with what we call a Murrine technique. Which is the cross section of the same rods, or a completely different rod with a pattern on it. Where that glass rod, or cane, has been chopped up into maybe a half-centimetre thick little mosaic piece. 
And then you heat them up and close the end of it. And then you have a closed volume that you can start blowing air into.  
It's a bit poetic, that you've breathed life into something…  
 
Perhaps it's also important to me that you can see that it couldn't possibly have been made by a machine. It takes a human being to make this. There isn’t a machine in the world that can do this… Only me.