WAYLAND WONG

Wayland Wong blows glass at the Tesuque Glassworks in Tesuque, and shows his work in his Galisteo Village studio. 

Glassblowing, he explains, is a highly structured process.  Working with a furnace is dangerous: the process entails dipping hollow metal rods in a vat of melted glass, blowing in short puffs and shaping the liquid glass bubble on the end of the blowpipe, thereby creating a “vessel.”  The vessel is then molded into shape by adding additional layers of molten glass and shaping and enlarging the vessel by puffing through the metal rod and and spinning the rod and vessel utilizing centrifugal force.  At this point color is added by rolling the semi-liquid vessel into finely ground colored glass, after which millefiori and other additions can be introduced. Thereafter the vessel is fired and cooled.

Before moving to Northern New Mexico, Wayland created representational objects such as fluted bowls, vases, and decorative plates. But the desert’s bright and unrelenting sun brought new inspiration: he moved into metalworking and approached glass as an abstract form, where light moving through a three dimensional object speaks in a personal and relevant way to its immediate environment. The strict discipline of the glass blower’s craftsmanship and the nature of the desert sun converge upon the amorphous state of the fluidity of glass.  

Wayland’s family made the journey from Canton Province in China into the Southwest as immigrant workers on the early railroads, and he finds the primary and bright colors associated with his heritage take on a new profundity when amplified by the the brilliance of the Northern New Mexico sun.