GA: What was your work like in the early days?
DH: The first pieces I made were with soft Italian glass, which we imported ourselves. The customs complications made that too frustrating, so I switched to working with clear borosilicate, which I continued to do for about 10 years. My work at the time was similar to Fräbel's or Milon Townsend's - sculptural work, sometimes as large as 4 feet tall, some representative, some abstract.

GA: When did you first become interested in historical murrine and millifiore?
DH: In 1990, and in 1992 I began working on the idea of creating mosaic glass face canes at the torch using soft glass for use in marbles and beads.

Early mosaic glass face canes(1992-95), Dinah Hulet. PHOTO: Patty Hulet

In 1995, I decided to attempt a detailed portrait cane in the manner of Giacomo Franchini's incredible miniatures using Paul Stankard as my subject.

In the middle of the 1800's in Venice, Franchini, a beadmaker, began creating mosaic glass imagery in the manner of the Ancient Egyptians. It had taken only 1,800-plus years for this technique to be re-discovered. He created a cane of a rosebud by starting with a simple design and adding additional details to it to build a more complex cane. He then went on to create a series of seven incredibly detailed miniature mosaic glass portrait canes of contemporary Italian political figures. His portrait of Count Cavour is about 1" in diameter. After completing his last portrait, one of the Emperor Franz Joseph, Franchini was placed in an insane asylum, where he died, and the secrets of how he created his amazing portraits died with him.

When I began to make my first portrait cane, little did I realize the difficulties and frustrations I would encounter. I spent countless hours developing a palette of colors, having to mix glasses to arrive at an adequate range of skin tones, and then I had to determine a method of attack. Like the ancient Egyptians and Franchini, I made separate canes for each feature. I then combined them in stages adding hot glass as I worked to build the shading and the form of the face. Slowly, after many, many failures, the face emerged, and after a full year of working on the project I placed the finished portrait in Paul's hand.

Portrait cane of Paul Stankard (1996), Dinah Hulet. PHOTO: Patty Hulet

I followed up the Stankard piece with several more small portraits. As I was working on these portrait canes I became interested in creating "lover's eyes", based on the miniature paintings of eyes derived from the portrait miniatures that were popular in the early part of the 19th century. Portrait miniatures were the snapshots of the day - they were small portraits usually painted on ivory intended to be carried around when one traveled or to be worn as broaches or pins.

GA: How did this work evolve into your current process?
DH: After the lover's eyes I decided to return to the Egyptian mosaic glass technique and to investigate the ideal of making what I call half canes, which are mounted together, side-by-side to complete the imagery. First I did a series of four Egyptian-inspired faces and used some fused cane components along with the lampworked face. I followed that with two insect pieces.

Continuing with the idea of using multiple slices taken from a single mosaic glass cane, I did a portrait study using repeated imagery. I then took the concept another step further with a geometric piece, where I mounted multiple triangle-shaped cane slices to create the illusion of depth.

Continuing with the idea of using multiple slices taken from a single mosaic glass cane,

Dinah Hulet created this portrait study using repeated imagery (1998). PHOTO: Patty Hulet

And then it occurred to me - I was using this mosaic glass technique in the manner of glass mosaics, where separate pieces of glass (called tesserae) are arranged so that they build an image. I was not only combining separate elements to make a complex design within a single cane of glass -- I was then combining these complex cane slices to form another, larger, even more complex design. This realization caused me to completely rethink the work I had been doing.

GA: Can you describe your process?
DH: Coming up with the imagery is step one. Generally I work from a face that affects me emotionally or that I have a strong response to. It doesn't have to be the face of someone I know, though generally it is. I sketch the face and scan it into my computer where I can play around with color and how I want to divide the face according to the grid. I print out several different versions, some with the grid work, some without, and cut the image into rectangles. I put away all but one rectangular section of the whole face, which I use as a pattern as I'm working. I have a finished picture of the whole face in front of me as I work, but I focus more on the singular rectangle. As I'm making the piece, I try to disassociate that little rectangle as being part of a face. I don't want to be thinking, I'm working on an ear or some specific part. I want to treat the rectangle as an entity unto itself.

I then set about building a series of preplanned rectangular canes or more accurately "cubes". Before I start, I come up with a palette of colors, mix them and pull my canes. I label the colors to correspond to a master sheet. I work more from the reference sheet rather than depending on what I'm looking at. Many times when I mix colors, I don't know what the color is going to look like once it's inside the cane and has been annealed and sliced.

Dinah Hulet's glass cubes, 1.25"h x 1"w x 1.5" deep (1998). PHOTO: Patty Hulet

As I build these cubes at the torch, I cannot see the detail of line, color and form that I'm sculpting three-dimensionally within each of them. It is only after the glass is annealed, when I slice into the cube, that the imagery I constructed on the inside is revealed. Remember the image is inside the glass, not on the surface. I don't stretch the glass cubes down to a smaller size because my intent is to expand the size of my image - not to miniaturize it.

I refer back to my paper rectangle to see if I got what I wanted. Sometimes I have to do as many as five different versions to get exactly what I'm looking for. It's not until I have all the pieces lampworked, sliced and laid out that I see the actual image of the face.
The sliced cubes are adhered to a base frame with silicon adhesive. I want space between each of the rectangles in the grid so the viewer can see the sides of the canes, because there's imagery there, too.