Having cut his teeth in craft as a tableware designer and later as a potter, Tavs Jorgenson made his mark in the field at the research and innovation end, producing stunning works through experimentation. Tavs developed a technique, Reconfigurable Pin Tooling, which allows for glass to be worked so that one side retained a smooth, flowing surface while the reverse could be poked and manipulated for infinite compositions, resulting in spiky, pointy landscapes.
This invention and the arresting result shown in this piece, acquired by Crafts Council Collection in 2012, caught the eye of Shai Akram, who in 2019 took up the Artisa curatorial fellowship with Crafts Council to “present making, or craft, as a state of relentless curiosity and rigour.” Shai’s resulting digital exhibition and accompanying report, Machine ghosts and scissorhands: reclassifying a craft collection, selected Large Pin Bowl among several objects typifying her reclassification theme ‘disrupting a process’. This identified objects that demonstrate “mind and machine working together, or a deviation from the usual rules, to challenge the limits of tools and technology - bringing a voice or authorship to the process.” As Shai says: “I feel that these objects illustrated in this theme are the physical manifestations of that moment of throwing away the rule book and asking, What if I...?”
Tavs’ invention is one creative output from a research project he had undertaken at that time to explore the new creative possibilities for glass and ceramics presented by emerging digital design and fabrication technologies. The Pin Tooling technique emerged from exploring how a single moulding device could make an infinite variety of shapes – which, as Tavs explains in the maker’s statement for this piece, has been tantalisingly described as a 'Universal Tool' or even as an 'Ideal Tool'.
Dafydd: “Tavs Jorgensen’s Pin Bowls are made by suspending glass over metal rods. The process complements the fluidity of glass, allowing it to mould in its own way. By being able to shift the length of the pins, Jorgensen has created a method that allows for constant change, exploration and improvement. The method, in a way, also relieves control of the making process, as the materials form themselves.”
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