Wauhatchie Glassworks is a working offhand glass studio located in the Cumberland Plateau foothills of Southeast Tennessee.
The rural setting, with a wet-weather stream sometimes flowing through the near-by cove, and a low ridge rising in the forest just outside make for a setting that tugs in two directions; toward quiet concentration within the studio, or out back to run with the dogs into the woods.
Prentice Hicks and several fellow-carpenters built the studio in 1993 with locally-harvested pine in post and beam architecture. Just in case the next generation wants to use it for something other than glass, it has been oriented South to take advantage of the Winter sun's heat. Prentice designed and built the melt furnace, big "glory hole", and main annealer to best suit his needs.
Work from the studio is primarily decorative glassware in a style reminescent of Art Nouveau. The fluidity of the cup forms coupled with the stretched stems and formed feet make work that is both attractive and comfortable to use. Some of the pieces are available with sandblasted stems and feet to effectively highlight the sensuous nature of glass handled as it is in this studio.
Prentice prefers to work alone, finding the pace and intensity of working hot glass best suited to him in this way.
The colors he uses are called "frit". Frit are glass gravels that come in various sizes and when gathered on the blowpipe turn into dots of color as small as this "o" or as big in diameter as a U.S. dime. The frit used in this studio falls somewhere in between these two sizes.
Unique to Prentice's method of working glass, is that almost always when forming the cup he uses no tools to get the shape and form. He works primarily with heat, centrifucal force, and gravity to achieve the desired results. Rarely will one find any sort of tool marks on a cup from the making of it.
When works are finished and removed from the annealing oven they are signed. If a piece is to be sandblasted, the cup is painstakingly masked with tape before the stem can be finished. Works that incorporate metal bases (see the "Special" page) are compleated glass first, with the metal base individually hand-forged to fit in the studio.
About the Studio