Toots Zynsky talks about working with glass outside of glassblowing. Oral history interview with Toots Zynsky, March 22, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:57.

Toots Zynsky: I knew that I loved the material. But I also knew from the very beginning that that wasn’t what I—glassblowing, which was the only thing that was offered at that point, wasn’t what I wanted to do with it. But I wanted to have my hands on that material and have access to it. So I started, you know, pouring it, stretching it [laughs], doing all kinds of strange things with it and then still felt limited and wanted to work with larger materials. And—you know, had started looking seriously at, you know, the Arte Povera movement, because I found that—something, really, like I connected with those ideas. And the idea that you could just make art out of anything was kind of a revelation [laughs] in the early seventies. And—so I started doing work with just raw crude, discarded, metal rusty—rusty pipes, and slumping large pieces of plate glass just very freely, free form. Not, not trying to make a particular form but using the form; just seeing what it would do combined with those materials. So I did a fair amount of work with that and then I had—from the very beginning been really fascinated with all the sounds that glass makes when you’re working in a glass studio, whether you’re blowing it or casting it or putting a pipe in a bucket, the sound of glass. You know, all of a sudden I realize those are perfect musical tones and music has always figured really importantly in my life. And so I decided I wanted to know more about that. Everyone was like, ‘Oh, the glass is breaking,’ you know, and I thought, ‘That’s really important that it breaks.’ I mean, there aren’t too many materials that break like that, that self break and explode with such force and make these amazing sounds. So it has to be important. There’s something there that’s really important. Why is it negative and I just started exploring that with video infrared, simultaneous infrared to see what was happening, and then attaching contact mics because sometimes inexplicable things wouldn’t happen. And it didn’t make sense. So I thought, ‘Maybe there’s something going on inside, that if I attach contact mics I’ll be able to hear it,’ and indeed, you know. You’d hear these fractures zooming across the glass that never physically appeared. It’s a really mysterious material.