Fat, delicious, juicy cross-sections of hand-pulled patterned glass cane are the star of this bowl. Each of the hundreds of cylinders of cane contains rings of vibrant color and tiny individual threads of colored glass caught in a matrix of transparent glass.
The murrine elements at the center of this bowl are sections individually cut from hand-pulled glass cane, which the artist creates by heating glass to 1500°F and pulling it into rods while molten in a modern-day adaptation of the 16th century techniques of the Murano glassmakers. The murrine are then melted together to form the four segments that surround the central bridge element. Once cooled and shaped on a diamond lapidary wheel, the murrine elements are combined with the central bridge element, which is made of strips of glass laid on edge. After a fourth firing in the kiln, the resulting circle is again shaped on a diamond lapidary wheel before a fifth trip through the kiln to slump into a soft bowl form.