Lamination by George Papadopoulos

Published 2004
ISBN 9780713661637
Format Paperback 128 pages. 234x156 mm.
Illustrations 94 colour

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This practical handbook covers the process of taking sheets of glass, decorating them by painting, sandblasting, cracking, shattering or etching, then covering them with another layer and fusing the layers together. Material, metal, paper etc can also be used as decoration between the layers. The process can be applied on a variety of scales, from very small (jewellery) to large wall panels and room dividers. Read an extract from "Lamination".

Extract: “My own laminating history”

The story of glass lamination begins with a series of accidents: Benedictus dropping his flask, two French women crashing their car and Henry Ford skidding on a dark road. My introduction to laminated glass as an art material came about in a similar way.

In 1997, I started an MA course in Ceramics and Glass at the Royal College of Art in London. From the start, I was not a good student. Glass tends to be treated with huge respect by artists and craftsmen, as a medium which is fragile and hard to work with. Breakage in the glass world is not seen as a good thing.

When my early experiences with kiln forming went wrong my impatient breaking of the rules when cooling molten glass led to a lot of breakages my tutors were not particularly happy. I, on the other hand, was delighted. As a budding ceramicist, I had always loved craquelure, the crackling in glazed surfaces. The more broken the results of my kiln forming, the happier I was. And this happiness reached a peak when I accidentally dropped a sheet of glass on the studio floor one day and, just like Benedictus, was amazed to see that it had broken but not shattered.

Unbeknown to me, the glass in question was laminated; it had not just broken, but broken beautifully. Like Benedictus, I too forgot about my discovery until I started on a work placement at a commercial glass studio in London that summer.

Fusion Glass was already making a product, Shattered Laminate, that used breakage to produce decrative results. In this process, a sheet of toughened glass was laminated between two sheets of float glass using a polyester based resin. When a corner of the toughened sheet was tapped with the point of a hammer, the sheet shattered but being in a resin sandwich held together. I was struck by the implication of this for my beautiful broken sheet back in the glass studio at the Royal College. For the rest of the summer, I spent my free time breaking laminated glass and then relaminating it between layes of float glass and resin.

Five years later, I am still breaking glass and putting it back together. I am often asked what the process is called: people are fond of describing it as ‘a contemporary take on stained glass’ although, of course, it is not. Over the past five eyars, I have broken glass with hammers, bricks, bullets and electrical currents. I have worked on glass that has been broken for me by a bag full of lead shot intended to replicate the exact impact of a standard human body running into a standard window. I have treated this broken glass with craons, pastels, gold leaf, pencils, car enamels, oils, commercial spray paints and just about anything else that has come to hand in my studio (including, frequently though accidentally drops of my own blood). I still do not know what the process is called and, frankly, I do not care. What I do know is that laminated glass is an enormously exciting material to work with, and that my experiments with it are just beginning.