Meet the Maker:
Cory Duda, Glassmaker
“Working with glass – it’s fun,” says Cory Duda, master glassmaker. “It's flow… I grew up with athletics. It's everything that I've loved about any sport I've ever participated in. It's accuracy. It's fluidity of motion. It's finding that Zen spot… you've gotta go to that place in the center of your mind that your arms just do their job and you don't think about it. You just check your steps and surrender to the flow.”
Cory has been making glass at Simon Pearce for over 25 years. At their flagship location in Quechee, Vermont, a glass making workshop lives one floor below its glittering showroom. Visitors are welcome to walk downstairs and see the glass designs come to life. As we enter the sweltering space, four other glassmakers are hard at work. We feel like we are on stage in the middle of a choreographed ballet performance, only the dancers are carrying eight-foot poles tipped with molten glass. And there are also several infernally hot annealing furnaces, plus a cooling furnace with a metal conveyor belt, to slowly move the finished glass pieces from 1000 degrees down to room temperature.
“Samantha is pulling a gather out of there,” Cory explains, indicating a coworker twirling a tennis ball of molten glass at the end of a pole. “So, in the furnace, that's 2100 degrees in the gathering bay. And a young apprentice is probably gonna pull 300-400 gathers a day out of that furnace. So that's how we get our practice, just by building it, by making a few mistakes and hopefully learning from them. These guys are working on our Simon Goblet today. I'll be working on our Simon's Wine. John here is putting the stem on his goblet… Each team's gonna be responsible for anywhere between 50 to 65 a day on items this size.”
Simon Pearce, one of the world’s leading makers of handmade glassware, got its start nearly 50 years ago when the founder (for which the company is named) decided he didn’t want to go into the family pottery business. “He didn't want to do what he knew how to do,” Cory says, “he wanted to learn something on his own.” Simon’s uncle had a collection of handmade glassware and over dinner one night, Simon asked him, Cory says, “‘How come you don't see glasses that look like this anymore?’ His uncle said that the world of mechanized production had long since moved in, and… it had taken over the world of glass production and people didn't make glasses by hand anymore. It was just too labor intensive.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
Cory had a similarly inadvertent detour into the world of glass. “I grew up in town here,” he says, “so I had known about Simon for most of my life. I used to come down here and watch him. Manufacturing wasn't necessarily what I was gearing myself towards. But I was looking for steady work. I came back from a year of college and found out that I was gonna be a father before I was heading back again and decided that I needed steady work. And my brother was the chef here, sous chef at the time, and he told me that they were looking for help in glass. So I said, ‘I’ll try that.’ I sent in my application, and they picked me up. The first day I worked here, I'd never worked so hard in my life. And I loved it.”
What he loves today about making glass at Simon Pearce, he says, is “the place, the people, the craft. It's just a beautiful organization to work for. The company dynamics here and everybody working for a common goal and quality, beautiful products.”
He twirls an iron blow pipe in the annealing furnace as he speaks. “The head of the iron needs to be red hot for the glass to stick to it, otherwise it won't break the surface tension of the glass.” He works the gather of molten glass to begin forming the collar. “It’s the smallest bit of glass,” he says, “but it allows you more surface area to gather on to get a slightly larger gather.” After adding another gather to the collar, he blows out the bowl of the Simon Glass he is making, then starts rolling and building the piece. So, co-worker (“Corey with an e”) brings another gather that forms the stem. And then a third for the base, which then gets affixed to another pole, and then the piece is severed from its original pipe and worked from the other way around.
Cory is a fluid force of constant, deliberate motion – rolling the bar, blowing, reheating it in the annealing furnace, and repeatedly measuring with a series of calipers near at hand. “The secret to our success,” he jokes. “Measuring them as we go. So many people will ask us how we keep them uniform. We check our steps. That and five or six years of practice. Now we're gonna heat up the rim of it, bring it back to pretty close to 2000 degrees right here.”
So what makes a good glassmaker?
“Ambition,” Cory replies. “Skill you're gonna learn. Ambition, shed your tears, come back for more. I mean, you're gonna fail for a long time. Each little step in that process was months of failure, getting to that point. And I mean you're going through a day… You've got eight hours. Not every one of them is gonna be perfect, but the majority of them are gonna still be very nice. If you're trying hard, they're gonna be very nice. Perfection is kind of a worthless pursuit, because it's about getting through a day and it's about doing well at your job and about staying positive. That's excellence. It's not always winning.”
And what distinguishes a master glassmaker?
“It's just general competency over nearly any assignment,” Cory explains. “Here in our shop, we're responsible for about 350 different designs. And some of them you probably won't see for 12 to 15 years. They're just gonna be too complicated. And a lot of what makes an item complicated is simply limited production. Very technical glasses like a champagne flute sell well, so there's gonna be opportunity for somebody in the seven- or eight-year range to get good at them. You're gonna have time to practice. But if you take a technical glass, like a champagne flute, and you only need to make it two or three times a year, it has to go to a master… And so that's why they keep the old ones around,” he laughs.
“Master is 10 to 12 years,” he adds. “But by seven or eight, you're good at the best sellers. I mean, that's really where you're starting to get good at your craft.”
Simon Pearce shows off some of the one-off works of its masters in a display case just inside the front door of the showroom. They are impressively large and artistically jaw dropping. And it is hard to imagine how they were even manipulated and heated.
A decade in the molten workshop and one might gain an inkling.
“Perfection is kind of a worthless pursuit, because it's about getting through a day and it's about doing well at your job and about staying positive. That's excellence. It's not always winning.”
The Vermont Maker Project
