Glass Arts Society Demo with Ann Potter

At the 2025 Glass Arts Society conference, I had the opportunity to collaborate on a live demonstration with Ann Potter—glass artist, disability advocate, and long-time thinker about access, process, and authorship in glass. What we shared on the demo stage wasn’t just a technique, but a way of rethinking how historic processes can be adapted, challenged, and made more responsive to the realities of contemporary studio practice.

The focus of our demo was a reinterpretation of the Swedish Graal technique, traditionally a coldworking-intensive process involving the carving of imagery into a colored blank that is then encased and reblown. Swedish graal is celebrated for its incredible depth, optical complexity, and narrative surfaces—but it is also notoriously labor-heavy and reliant on extensive cold shop access. Our question was simple but generative: What happens if we try to achieve that same depth and complexity entirely in the hot shop?

Rather than carving, we approached graal as an assembly problem—layering color, imagery, and negative space through sequential hot applications. Ann’s surface sensibility and conceptual clarity paired naturally with my interest in process-driven problem solving and historical reinterpretation. Together, we worked toward a strategy that allowed the imagery to remain embedded and legible while preserving the visual depth that defines classic Swedish graal.

My role in the collaboration focused on gaffing the piece and helping articulate an assembly strategy that could create sufficient depth without engraving. Gaffing, in this context, wasn’t just about execution—it was about translation. How do you take an image or surface idea and break it down into a sequence of gathers, inclusions, and encasements that will survive multiple heats without collapsing visually? How do you preserve crispness while working only hot?

Working live on the demo floor made those questions visible in real time. The audience could see the decision-making, the adjustments, and the moments where historical reverence met practical constraint. That transparency felt important. Too often, iconic techniques are presented as fixed or precious; this demo was about showing graal as something alive—capable of being rethought, retooled, and made more accessible without losing its essential qualities.

Equally important was the collaborative dynamic itself. Ann’s advocacy work brings necessary attention to how access shapes who gets to participate in glass, and how techniques evolve when bodies, tools, and systems are designed with care rather than assumption. This demo wasn’t framed around limitation—it was framed around possibility, adaptability, and shared authorship.

Ultimately, the piece we made wasn’t meant to replace traditional graal. It was a conversation with it. A reminder that technique is not static, and that collaboration—across skill sets, experiences, and perspectives—is one of the most powerful tools we have for pushing the field forward.