Corning Museum of Glass

The newest sculpture at the Corning Museum of Glass is the focus of October’s Behind the Glass lecture. Israeli designer Ayala Serfaty will speak about her sculpture Soma 2015, on view now at the Museum. Serfaty was selected to create one of four special commissions incorporating glass and light to celebrate the opening of the Museum’s new Contemporary Art + Design Galleries. Serfaty’s Soma series is both functional lighting and conceptual sculpture, inspired by landscape formations. Serfaty worked for six years to develop the sculptures, made of flameworked borosilicate glass filaments encased in polymer. The glass rods of the Soma structures are handmade in Italy, and fused and flameworked in Serfaty's Tel Aviv studio.  The finished glass structures are sprayed with a clear polymer to create a skin-like membrane. The polymer was developed in the late 1940s by the U.S. military to protect ships in long-term storage.