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VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
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Gestures of Making is part of La Gestothèque, an anthropological research programme investigating gesture as situated, embodied knowledge through audiovisual and sensory ethnography. The project builds catalogues of gestures by combining in situ observation with artists’ own accounts of their practice, approaching gesture as a boundary object (Star & Griesemer, 1989) whose meaning shifts across artistic, scientific and technical communities.
This film presents one case study within that framework. It follows British glass artist Emma Woffenden in her studio, as anthropologist Anne Dubos observes the making of a sculptural work — investigating how artistic knowledge emerges through the interaction of body, materials, tools and imagination. Its originality lies in using film not simply to record but to inquire: after the observational sequences, Woffenden watches footage of her own practice and comments on gestures that normally remain tacit while making.
This dialogue between observation and self-observation lets the artist recognise dimensions of her practice that had escaped conscious reflection — the unexpected delicacy of her hand movements, the role of fingertips and breathing, the ongoing negotiation between technical control and material responsiveness. Gesture emerges as a site where embodied experience, sensory attention, historical memory, material intelligence, workshop tradition and imagination converge, irreducible to technical expertise alone.
Situating her practice within a lineage from Émile Gallé, René Lalique and Gabriel Argy-Rousseau to contemporary studio glass, Woffenden’s commentary reveals gesture not as an isolated movement but as the expression of technical, historical and economic lineages that continue to shape practice.
Gestures of Making argues that gesture is a mode of thinking through materials, and that film — enabling anthropologist and artist to jointly produce knowledge about making — becomes a collaborative research instrument, situated at the intersection of visual anthropology, artistic research and craft studies.
Credits
Author / Filmmaker / Researcher:
Anne Dubos: anne.dubos@gmail.com
Glass Artist:
Emma Woffenden: e.woffenden@btinternet.com
Music:
Arnaud Vernet: mail@le-naun.fr
Production:
Little Heart Movement 2023–2026
Keywords: Gesture, Situated knowledge, Glass art, Visual anthropology, La Gestothèque.
Gestures of Making is an observational film centered on the work of the glassmaker Emma Woffenden filmed by the anthropologist Anne Dubos.
The film brings together two perspectives: an external gaze on the making process, and the artist’s own voice, reflecting on her gestures, as she watches herself at work.
[1:00]
Anne Dubos
Anthropologist & Artist
[Anne Dubos:]
I started doing catalogues of gestures, and I built what I call La Gestothèque — that’s the body of my work, where I interview artists, researchers and scientists, and I try to help them understand — or make — the idea of gesture as a boundary object, especially when you work in a transdisciplinary field, where you understand that saying the word “gesture” means something different for everybody.
So I try to help people define what a gesture is for them, and understand also the chain of action they need to develop their practice. That’s basically my work, and I describe it through ethnography, and I tend to create catalogues of gestures.
Emma Woffenden, glass artist, sculptor
[2:15]
Emma Woffenden
Gestures of Making
[ Emma Woffenden:]
I was quite surprised, looking from the outside, at the hand movements. But when I feel like I’m doing it, I feel like I’m doing something much more rigorous — but it’s actually quite delicate. I would have thought I was using my whole hands, and I was using my fingertips a lot.
Emma Woffenden
Glassmaker
My name’s Emma Woffenden, and I am a sculptor and make drawings. I trained as a glassmaker from the age of nineteen, and have worked in most forms of glassmaking at different points, and set up quite comprehensive studios at times. I’ve worked with the gallery, and in different contexts and design, and I’m based in London.
This is half a form, and it’s symmetrical—and that’s another thing which relates very strongly to glass.
I’ve worked a lot, especially early on, trying to achieve some sort of symmetry in shape-making. And that’s, of course, again a glass connection, because when you blow glass you’re always blowing something symmetrical, or trying to achieve symmetry to control the thing on the end of the blowing pipe. That’s what I did initially with glass—a lot of glass-blowing.
And then all this work—this is a fibreglass mold, taken from a modelled form which was actually clay and polystyrene. Then I go on to take molds from it, and slump glass over it.
So with the two halves—it’s like a column with a bud form on top. It relates quite directly to a smaller blade shape I’ve worked with, and also to a hand shape. This is one half of a shape, and the mold is the negative of the shape, and I’m painting in what will be the top layer of the positive shape.
So it becomes three-dimensional once you put the two halves together.
If this were a resin-fibreglass system—if I were boat-building, or making some huge outdoor sculpture—I’d be making it in resin and fibreglass. But I’m using a gypsum-based product, and I’m putting on the first layer. It could have lots of things in it—colours, or ground stone, to emulate another type of material—but I’m just using it straight. They call it a “gel coat” in the industry.
[6:24]
When I chose to study glassmaking, it really was one of the first courses in the UK, and we were the first cohort to go through purely learning glassmaking. I went to the Royal College of Art in the early 1990s, and I graduated with a very strong body of work, which really shifted the aesthetics of the medium.
Royal College of Art
People in the early ’90s really responded to that first show, and—although I wasn’t that strongly aware of it at the time—I was being offered and nurtured in different ways. And that included a relationship with the gallery.
This shape has got more than one reason—it comes from more than one place. I’ve recently used these kinds of shapes almost like a puppet hand — a simplified hand—and they come from puppets I used to watch on TV as a child, called The Woodentops.
So I’ve used this form in the hand of a figure recently. But it’s also a very early form I made in glass, on a larger scale — I would originally have made it in blown glass. This time I made these molds also to take other molds from, from which I melt sheet glass over the top. These shapes and materials, they all exist and talk to each other and influence each other.
Factories that were closing down at the time — Waterford, and the British industry that was disappearing. It was between 1981 and ’84, and it was an amazing privilege. I also started to cast glass in those first years — lost-wax casting — and there was no knowledge of it at all. We were literally looking in old books, from America, from Steuben, and making it up and experimenting.
Over time, this medium became very accessible, and now there’s a huge hobbyist market — everything is compatible, everything is easy to work.
But when we started, studio glassmaking — moving from industry into the artist’s studio — was still very young in the UK. It had its origins in the States, and of course an older origin in France, with Gallé and Lalique, and Argy-Rousseau — people who had contact with the medium in the 19th century.
Emile Galle 1846–1904
Famous art nouveau artist from Nancy
Gabriel Argy-Rousseau 1885–1953
Specialized in pate de verre
[9:56]
So, when this first painted layer activates and hardens, we start building it up with the next layer. I’m using the same stuff at the moment, in the studio, in a rubber mold — and I’ve thrown in some fresh ordinary plaster to make it go off a bit quicker, so I don’t waste the materials.
When you make something with your hands, you don’t necessarily — you might make a drawing, you might make a model, you might take it quite a long way — but even then, during that whole process, you might not really know what it is you’re doing.
You don’t have it verbalised in your head, you don’t necessarily see it. That’s something I find very interesting — I think I knew that when I was really young — that you could just make something with your hand, and then you look at it, and it’s part of you.
It might be what you’re really thinking or feeling, and you didn’t really know it — and then it stands before you, so to speak.
[11:24]
I think a gesture, for me, can be a very minute thing — something that immediately comes to mind. Again, in the ’90s I became very interested in gesture.
I was very interested in slow motion, because you can really start to see these tiny movements — and I was very aware that in my work, especially the blowing work, there was a lot of gesture and movement in the medium itself.
There’s a lot of movement in blowing glass, and it became very important to me because I understood that, somehow, that’s how we decipher the people around us. I was very, very interested in the body, and I think I was able to distil — I was really interested in distilling gesture — the idea of relating it to the body, in the sense that I had a sense of my body curling in and curling out.
I was very interested in breathing, the idea of the breath — so I could see gesture in a very abstract way. But it could also be a sensation. And maybe gesture is a different connection — maybe you actually skip the thinking, you go straight to the hands. What happens between the hand and the material?
[13:30]
This stuff is — it’s like a PVA, like a wood-glue base, probably. It’s a secret recipe. I’m weighing it two-and-a-half to one, by weight ratio. I’ve been thinking about it recently — just [inaudible]*, you know, as a fourteen-year-old, learning these few basic skills with ceramics — you make a pebble pot, and then you make this little slab box.
And then — you know — that’s just an amazing thing, that you actually managed to form something in your hands. And I remember, very quickly afterwards, having my first sort of idea or concept — which was to try and make a ball, a coiled ball, where you can’t see the base.
That was my obsession — that it looked like it was floating. So I guess that was, yeah, the first time I was trying to make a sensation, in a way, because I wanted that ball to look like it was ungrounded. You couldn’t see the base —that’s what I was obsessed with — and it was a coil pot.
[15:45]
So yeah, I think in recent years I’ve been thinking a lot about that, and worrying less about how things fit into art forms, or time, and realising there’s quite a basic reason and desire — and the desire is perhaps more important than the outcome.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot. And now I’m putting in the fibreglass, and there’s a matting — the matting is designed so that it can stretch around into a three-dimensional shape — and the top strand, which is in the jar, is a reinforcing material.
I think I’ve used this material more and more over the years, because it’s very stable, and it’s something I can also use with glass — it’s quite light. I can make part of a sculpture in this material, and somehow fix it within or around the glass — and in a sense it is glass itself. I always describe it—when you put it against glass, it’s quite a dead material.
You know, if you had a whole sculpture made out of this material, I always have the sense it’s not like a stone, or a ceramic, or even a bronze — that it’s a bit close to a plastic, in a way. And glass — when you put a little bit of glass anywhere near this stuff, the contrast is quite interesting.
So I end up with a lot of glass form. I take molds off glass shapes — blown glass or cast glass — and then remake them in another material. So I’m going back and forth all the time.
Initially I worked a lot with styrofoam shapes — styrofoam is quite a nice material to work with in relation to glass, because again it’s very light, and it’s also an “inflated” material — and then I’d reinforce that with car-body filler, and really work the surface. But it could take six weeks to make the model. When I first started out, I was making quite large-scale objects and shapes — you might make it roughly in clay, and then take it into another material, and then really hone it, so to speak. So there’s a lot of moving around with that.
And then, once you have that shape — in the early days, when I was casting, I used to cast a lot — you’d take that model, which had taken a long time to make, and make it into wax, and then that wax needed to be made into glass, and that glass could be in the kiln for weeks and weeks. So, after the mold-making and all these things — over the years it’s become easier, as the movement from industry back into the artist’s studio, with glass as a material. It was quite young when I started, and now a lot of other companies and suppliers have grown up around it. A lot of studios have become tried-and-tested artist studios. So all those things have become easier.
I quite like cutting this stuff to fit—a bit like layers of skin, or something. So you need to — and actually, I find quite often that people reduce some of these very long processes, they’ll put it in one word, as if it’s just some simple skill. But there’s so much technology and process that you really need to know about. So — this is one thing, but the refractory mold that came out of this was then put in a kiln, and glass was formed over it, and then cut out, ground, and glued together.
There’s this reductive thing that happens, and I always like — when I’m on a panel or something — to point out that the people sitting there aren’t just craftspeople: they actually run businesses, they build their own furnaces, they’ve got a really good, scientific knowledge — and you need to learn a lot, just beyond trying to be an interesting artist.
I grew up in a family where I was sort of the non-artistic, not-practical one — and then I learned a huge amount of practical skills. I remember not being able to change a lightbulb, or plugging in an electric kettle and lighting a gas ring under it — things that weren’t very logical behaviour. I mean, I was quite young at the time, but I always feel you learn — it’s just like any other form of practice: you practise it.
Woffenden Studio
Bourg-Argental. France
Summer 2022
Anne Dubos
For Little Heart Movement
Saint-Julien-Molin-Molette. January 2026
[22:25]
[Emma speaking to Anne:]
I was really minding hand movements — so rather than taking this lump of glass to a spinning flatbed wheel, I was doing it by hand, actually — because I couldn’t ‘mind’ the machine, and otherwise I’d have just stood there like this. So I decided to do things by hand — lots of circular movement, in glass as in ceramics, really. And then also taking grinding materials to the glass, using other bits of glass — and then mixing, mold-making, sprinkling plaster across the surface of water, and waiting for it to be absorbed, and then finally stirring.
Musique: Arnaud Vernet Le Naun