Video Transcript

Cupboard:
This is John with another addition of The Cupboards Artists Insights, and we’re with another great glassblower, Scot from Cherry Glass. Scot, what motivated you to be a glassblower, pipe maker?

Scot Bennett:
I used to work in the healthcare field and then one of my high school friends moved back up north, where I live. He was a glassblower down there and asked me if I wanted to apprentice under him. Naturally, I said yes, and as soon as I can make $500 a month, I quit my other job and went fulltime glassblowing.

Cupboard:
How many years have you been blowing glass?

Scot Bennett:
10 years now.

Cupboard:
As a glassblower, I’m sure after 10 years you’ve had experience with injuries. Any particular incidents stand out in your memory?

Scot Bennett:
My worst injury, I ended up in the ER, because I was watching TV and making a marble at the same time. I tilted my hand into the fire when I looked up at the TV, and I burnt both  my knuckles and they swelled up, about that high, with a blister. That took me out of work for about two weeks. I learned not to watch TV and blow glass at the same time.

Cupboard:
Your glass is different than a lot of other glassblowers. You do a lot of electroforming, like the castles. We have some of those in The Cupboard right now, and if you want to talk about these, what influenced you to make those, and what makes your glass a little different?

Scot Bennett:
We were able to learn how to electroform and we didn’t really want to go into the steampunk design. We thought about what else could we do, instead of going steampunk, or just plain coppering. I like castles, I like the medieval style, so I made a castle, and the electroforming made it all come together.

At the same time, I had heard that we could electroform bugs. When I heard about that, I caught a spider in my house and I froze it real quick. That was the first thing I electroplated, was a spider. We do bugs. We do butterflies, dragonflies, scorpions. Whatever we can get our hands on.

Cupboard:
How cool. Tell our listeners where they can find you on social media.

Scot Bennett:
We use Instagram, in which we’re CherryGlass for there, just all one word. On Facebook we’re also CherryGlass.

At The Cupboard in Cincinnati, you can find a lot of my pieces there, and some of the more unique ones are my castles that I make. We use real bugs, like here is a tarantula hawk-wasp. That’s a bug that’s known for hunting down spiders.

What I did there is I put a wolf spider just below it, and I have the tarantula hawk-wasp is going to be attacking it. I’m trying to make it have a little action and a little theme behind it. We make our own webbing and we use glow-in-the-dark powder on the castles, so that they’ll shine bright when you bring them into a dark room.

We use Brazilian argot slabs for the base so that they sit nice and flat. I don’t know. I just think they’re really cool because they glow in the dark and they’re real bugs.