Lathe Riders Open The 2024 GAS Conference In Berlin!
The Lathe Riders brought cold work into the limelight at this year’s Glass Art Society conference in Berlin. For the first time in history, cold work got centre stage as the opening demo at a GAS conference.
Cold working — grinding, cutting and polishing glass — is often overlooked, relegated as a process to “finish” works. We came to Berlin to change this perception and show an international audience how much more is possible.
Months of Zoom meetings and planning now congealed. We were ready to show and share our passion for grinding glass.
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- The Lathe Riders at GAS 2024
The Lathe Riders
The Lathe Riders are a collective of like-minded cold workers. We come from all over the world — Europe, USA, and even South Africa. Fourteen of us made it to Berlin, to set up the best little cold shop in town. We arrived on the Sunday preceding the conference, unloading machines, wheels and equipment.
It’s no small feat to have a fully functional cold shop materialise out of thin air. During the months preceding the conference we sourced equipment from our own studios, university departments and basements.
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- Unloading machines
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- Bringing in the machines
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- Spatzier Lathe
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- Spatzier Lathe
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- Silicon Carbide Flatbed
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- Silicon Carbide Flatbed
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- Fortuna Diamond Lathe
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- Lathe Riders Cold Shop
Samuel Weisenborn (Germany) offered to use his barn to store and prepare two Spatzier lathes (for stone wheels) and one Furtuna diamond lathe. Petr Slavík (Czech Republic) loaded two flatbed machines to show how one can efficiently do flat surface grinding and polishing. Ioana Stelea (Romania) built a foot-pedal driven engraving lathe, and brought a portable engraving lathe from the National University of Arts in Bucharest.
Showtime!
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- Vicki Higginson
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- Petr Slavík
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- Noa Agassi
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- Lothar Böttcher
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- Pawel Palewicz
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- Samuel Weisenborn
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- Henriikka Pöllänen
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- Jenny Mulligan
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- Ioana Stelea
Everyone in our team took initiative and helped make our pilgrimage to the GAS conference a reality:
Henriikka Pöllänen (Finland) and Julian Michel (Germany) coordinated our opening demo and presentation; Jenny Mulligan (Ireland/Sweden) helped with admin and communications (and did an exceptional job to remind us of all the deadlines!); Pawel Palewicz (Poland) brought wheels, glass and rocked the house with his amazing performance; Patrick Roth (Austria) managed the finances and secured additional funding from sponsors; and Lothar Böttcher (South Africa) coordinated and managed communications between the team and GAS from Pretoria…
New members, Selma Hamstra (Netherlands) and Noa Agassi (Netherlands), set up our social media strategy and fundraising campaign; Vicki Higgenson (UK) launched our website — latheriders.com.
Every Lathe Rider played their part, allowing us to emerge from our cold shop caves, to Rock the glass art world!
Wilhelm Hallen
After all the heavy lifting, setting up machines, connecting water and electricity, the best little cold shop in Berlin was ready to roll!
Wednesday evening erupted in a cacophony of grinding and cutting with wheels sinking into chunks of glass. While Patrick Roth, Pawel Palewicz, Petr Slavík and Lothar Böttcher got gritty on the machines, hundreds of delegates milled through the cold shop, taking pictures and gawking at the action.
Everyone was watching in bewilderment at the show unfolding and T-shirts were flying off the shelves. The Lathe Riders made a lasting impression, revealing our love and passion for cold work.
Lots of new and old friends visited us during the following days. Questions were asked and long conversations sparked. Many people were intrigued by the stone wheels we were using. We shared tips and tricks, explained processes and maintenance, offered hands-on demos, keeping the momentum going.
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- Best little cold shop in Berlin
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- Showing how the lathes work
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- Sharing tips and tricks
Cold Perspectives, Fantom Galerie, Berlin
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- Cold Perspectives
Cold Perspectives, the exhibition curated by Ioana Stelea and Henriikka Pöllänen at the Fantom Galerie, showed work by several Lathe Riders and was part of the official GAS conference lineup.
This was a fine opportunity to witness diverse approaches to art making, focussing on cold working techniques. Works ranged from cut and polished vessels, large lenses, pinhole photography to interactive sculptures where guests were invited to smash large blocks of suspended glass blocks into another as an uncontrolled cold working process.
Cold Perspectives was on view from 14-18 May at the Fantom Galerie, Berlin.
Thank you GAS!
It was an honour and special opportunity to present the Lathe Riders at the Glass Art Society conference. As mentioned above, this was the first time for cold workers to feature as headliners for the opening demo.
We are confident that a lasting impression was made, and that cold work will start to be understood as its own branch of creative glass making. We are looking forward to future collaborations with GAS and the global glass family at large.
The future looks sparkling and we hope to continue to channel our energy and love for cold work to new generations of gritty grinders.
Keep those wheels turning! Rock ’n Roll…!
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- Lathe Riders at GAS 2024, Berlin
