Kilncasting and Fusion

Chantal Royant | General

Session: 7/2005 4 - 17 September

This class will explore the almost endless possibilities of kilnformed glass. Students will learn how to master fusing and slumping techniques and how to incorporate them into kilncast sculptures. Beside the control of these techniques, students will be invited to explore how the glass fluidity allows expressing the movement, colors and interactions of both in creating unique forms. Through a theoretical and practical approach, the students will discover the physical properties of glass, the techniques, the materials, the tools, open faced mold design and construction, heating and annealing, how to identify flaws and how to avoid them. Works of contemporary artists will be presented too. The workshop is based on the personal work of Chantal Royant and the development of a personal project by each participant.

Chantal Royant

Chantal Royant Chantal Royant (France, 1957) practiced stained glass, fusing and slumping in Californian studios for ten years. In 1989, enriched by that experience in the heart of the studio glass movement, she came back to Brittany (France), her homeland and developed her own researches in kilncasting. Her work is the expression of a personal world that emerges to reality as fluid and colored forms suddenly fixed in the glass. Flows, waves, streams, nets, archaic forms, come to us from a remote and deep space and create a new microcosm within the glass. Chantal Royant participated in many exhibitions in France and Europe: Italy, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Netherlands. Her works were recently shown at Reticello 2002 exhibition, Glass Museum, Ebeltof, Denmark. She taught workshops at the Glass Furnace, Istanbul, Fundación Centro Nacional del Vidrio, La Granja, Segovia, Spain and has been teaching since 1993 at Centre Européen de Recherche et de Formation aux Arts Verriers (European Research and Training Centre for Glass Arts, CERFAV), Vannes-le-Chatel, France.