James Carpenter discusses experimental work he made with Dale Chihuly. Oral history interview with James Carpenter by Barb Elam and Jesse Merandy, September 20, 2018, JCDA Studios, New York, New York. Clip length: 02:02.

James Carpenter: Well sort of both. I mean I think you probably, maybe you know a lot of those early neon pieces. [inaudible] with Dale. They were all things we started working on together. And we did a show at the Craft Museum [Museum of Contemporary Crafts, now Museum of Arts and Design, New York], in ’71 I guess, that had these tall, seven or eight foot tall blown glass forms. I mean the experimentation I think had to do with going back to some of this I just said a moment ago was not the formality of using wooden blocks and blowing a vessel and punties and all of that. It was more about letting the glass actually find a form that it naturally wanted to take and that’s where we got into this whole thing of blowing it, gathering up our glass, letting it fall on the floor and then inflating the pieces and actually learning that the floor material itself, you know if it was wetted before you dropped the glass on it, it would produce steam. It would actually begin blowing its own forms, so that you could control just by letting the steam escape. You know, it’s on a blow pipe but it’s where you are using two different ways of working with the glass. So it was a lot of experimentation with process, I think, which has stayed with me and stayed with the underlying foundation of the studio. And I think that Dale and I were after like trying to do things that were truly more sculptural and were also on the edge of that whole conceptual art movement and land art movement type of thing. So my own work began to be sort of in the ‘72, three, four there began doing more photography on glass and film installations and that coincided with some work I did at Corning on photosensitive glass. So I got invited to go to work at Corning which I did for several years. So—and that introduced me to obviously a much more technical level of glass making and I worked with a really terrific person there, fortunately, who invented glass ceramics so I learned a lot.