Fire Craft

Art, Body, and World Among Glassblowers

Erin E. O’Connor

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Hardback

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English

Columbia University Press
12 August 2025

Ceramic arts, pottery, glass; Social theory; Social & cultural anthropology

Glassblowing by hand might seem like a dying art, yet it is thriving: Studios and universities offer popular classes, and glass art is widely exhibited and sold. Amateur and professional glassblowers alike are captivated by the choreography of fire, smoke, and molten material. Why are people drawn to this ancient craft? What is distinctive about the social, physical, and intellectual experience of glassblowing? How does the body learn an art?

In Fire Craft, Erin E. O'Connor interweaves an immersive firsthand account of her experiences learning to blow glass with a sensuous ethnography of embodiment and community among glassblowers. Through compelling stories, such as her struggle to produce an elegant goblet, she shows how a novice becomes hooked by and committed to a craft. Reflecting on embodied knowledge, O'Connor considers how we negotiate mistakes and failures, how we strive to develop proficiency in the face of shortcomings, and how through making objects we make meaning. She also explores the history of glassblowing and how various social, environmental, and knowledge frameworks shape the valorization of craft. From the furnaces of empire to the hot bodies of collaboration and love, O'Connor reveals the interconnectedness of the body with the elemental world. A gripping tale of the social world and experience of glassblowing, Fire Craft passionately defends practical labor as intellectual work that changes self and society.

By: Erin E. O’Connor
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 216mm, Width: 140mm,
ISBN: 9780231218436
ISBN 10: 0231218435
Pages: 296
Publication Date: 12 August 2025
Audience: College/higher education , Further / Higher Education
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Erin E. O’Connor is an associate professor of sociology in the Department of Politics and Human Rights at Marymount Manhattan College. She is a recipient of the Rakow Grant for Glass Research at the Corning Museum of Glass.

Reviews for Fire Craft: Art, Body, and World Among Glassblowers

Fire Craft is a long-awaited response to the lack of critical discussions of the glass craft field. From the perspective of the practitioner, this book argues beautifully for the act of making as a transformative process of both personal becoming and world-making that is relevant far beyond the craft discourse. -- Camilla Groth, coauthor of <i>Craft and Design Practice from an Embodied Perspective</i> This book makes a unique and important contribution to our understanding of craft and embodied knowledge. O’Connor’s long apprenticeship as a glassblower has endowed her with firsthand knowledge and expertise, and her careful reflections on her personal learning trajectories as a maker enrich both her ethnographic storytelling and theoretical analyses. -- Trevor H. J. Marchand, author of <i>The Pursuit of Pleasurable Work: Craftwork in Twenty-First Century England</i>