White Thread Sphere

This amazing work from Patchen's "Sphere Series" is made from approximately 20,000 super-fine white glass threads embedded throughout the piece. The scale and detail in this Sphere display Patchen's mastery of the murrini technique which he uses for most of his work. Creating this sphere required a number of days, starting with stretching molten glass with a white center into rods called cane, re-heating and fusing lengths of this cane together and re-pulling them two additional times. When cooled, these finely-patterned rods are then carefully cut into hundreds of glass tiles called murrini, arranged on a ceramic plate, fused, then rolled onto a blowpipe to make the final work. The difficulty and sheer amount of work involved makes this style of glass very uncommon.