Going Clear Part II: Doctor Bulb

An imperfect newsletter about glass

A puddle is just a small ocean

A bottle is a little world

The glass is a boundary

A blank canvass is immediately divided

Glass supports the division in way that refers to light

All for Joy to see the shape

—from my notes on my conversations with Dylan Kehde Roelofs 2023-2024

I’ve left this so long that everything seems like glass now. A few weeks ago I started this letter in a late spring snow squall which seemed to suit the theme. A snowglobe. Everything whirling around outside my studio. The drifty sort of circulation of sediment in a bottle finally settling into layers like limestone. The next week I was at a party in New York and the walls up 30 feet to the ceiling covered in glittering, shivering chainmail and standing on the open second floor looking out at the sea of famous people and almost-famous people and eating tiny hamburgers and their glasses golden free bubbles all circulating like particles. And then I was on the road to Montreal a few days ago, the sky’s cathedral of clouds painted across the perfect-blue ceiling dome fit over everything, stubbly fields and soft grey woods and highway rest stops. And finally, back in Toronto the rains came and bent everything fish-eyed to the smooth curvature of the world. The rain at night crying and crying and I could not sleep surrounded in water. I can’t get a grip on these words for you. Partly because I’ve been on the road, and partly because I can’t get my notes to coalesce into something that you would like. I’ve felt suspended inside my own mood. Inside this note to you. It should be crystalline, beautiful, perfect what I write to you about glass and the glass-maker. But instead I am full of false starts.

I think I went into the conversation with Doctor Bulb thinking I’d found a wizard with secrets to the meeting point of matter and spirit. I think I went into the interview loving his bits of esoteric wisdom dropped like breadcrumbs. And I think I thought you could come along with me into this initiation of arcane findings. Or that was my idea. I wanted to get it right, get it exact, get it perfect. I wanted to hold the contradictions of glass. I wanted to be absolutely clear. And I’ve been frozen in this idea of getting it right. Holding onto it. And then I realized— just send it out, let it be imperfect. Because really it’s the idea of imperfection that I most want to share with you. That sometimes you just need to make the painting, cook the soup, send the letter, get on the dancefloor. Forget hoping for the best and just make a beginning.

A standard interview with Dylan Kehde Roelofs aka Doctor bulb feels impossible, or at least beside the point, and trying to make sense of my notes I figure I might as well start with the logical beginning of his instagram bio:

Mad scientist, scholar, daguerreotypist, scientific/artistic glassblower, old-school burner ('97-'09), alchemist and tree-worshipper. Single. Odd.

When I talked to Doctor Bulb late last year he agreed that the bio was still accurate. To this I might add that he is also the guy that:

1. Yale and MOMA called a couple of years ago when they need a historically accurate and working bulb for an art installation.

2. The witches of the Pacific North West call when they need a dew-based distillation system.

3. The high end restaurants in New York and SanFrancisco call when they need a sculptural art deco lighting set up for their bar.

4. Etsy shoppers might stumble upon whilst looking for hand-made, hand designed surrealist-retro-futurist lamps.

5. My friends Heidi Gustavson and Thomas Little called when they needed a magical, magnetically-charged vessel for gun-based ink.

6. Marvel called when they needed some Afro-futurist lab glass for the background of Shuri’s lab in Black Panther II.

7. And I called last year, because I was curious about his world. And then again this year because I wanted to commission him for something personal and still vague and because there was still so much more to talk through.

First we talked shapes because I could not get out of my head his glass-inside-glass-inside-glass shapes connected in an alien digestive system way, but to distill the dew collected at dawn by a certain sort of herbalist witch.

He calls it a Hermetic diode, if you will. Made on rollers, flame anneal, 70 mm outer jacket, (to quote from his caption).

“My shapes are a topology of depth. A hermetic animism underwritten by the green muse,” he says. I can see just by scrolling though his images that he is making not just containers but systems almost little factories for collecting, sorting, concentrating and rearranging rare liquids. You might say that each one is a work of scientifically meticulous craftsmanship that in their beauty approaches art. Except that some of these works seem to be out beyond art too. Like frozen ghosts or see-through ideas or an engineer’s models of waterslide tube that loops briefly into a parallel universe before returning to the Pacific North West.

Doctor Bulb keeps speaking of the poem of glass. I later understand he is taking the word back to poesis, a Greek word for making. It seems to me that he is doing a few kinds of poetry in his studio. “The glass I make is predicated on forms, ancient rules, devine proportions,” he says. I am writing as fast as I can because he talks in paragraphs and I know the answer would be different if I asked him again the same thing. Listening to him feels somehow glassy. Full of different pressures. “The vitrious state,” he says, “is a peculiarity of physics. It sighs and relaxes in the flame while everything else explodes or bursts into flame.” He goes on,“I address her in poesis as the only syntax to which she responds.”

He talks about the incredible skill and dexterity and danger of the making of glass and I love the way he searches for words to describe the intensity of his work. “It’s like juggling molton razor blades in a lightsaber so sharp it can cut you and you don’t feel the cut. You dance but she leads. She is a harsh muse, lurid and vivid and intense, and you open up the kiln to find the tracks of ballerina that represent every gesture. Confrontation with the work will come in the next day. You can not fool it or fake this poem. It is the summation of an elegant work, an excreting of that reverence and danger.” I am pretty sure that was all in one breath. I picture the hardened glass as less a goal and more a record of where he has gone with the materials.

Again, like a poem, Dylan’s explanations throw off sparks of references that you feel first and look up later. The sushi chef term omakase about ceding control to the maker, Athanasius Kircher’s Jesuit polymathic work along the edge of science and spirit. Enki the Summerian god of wisdom and his drinking games. Winter as the season of putrification. The Dali Lama’s doctor. The inner arcana of the tarot. Spagyric medicine. The Pelican Retort. The purification of Agrippa. The dark photography of Joel-Peter Witkin. The calligraphy of Joseph Uccello of Three Hands Press. The New York witchcraft of Meredith Graves.

The second time we talked, I asked Dr. Bulb about the way he used the word poetry and he called poetry the entanglement of the explicable and the ineffable. He is both researcher and practitioner. He also calls himself an arcane circulationist. Because I am hoping to commission him to create a kind of model heart, we talk about how a liquid moves from one chamber to another how materials are separated by letting some heavier materials settle in place, and others move upward as gas or liquid that move through tubes to join some higher, purer version of the material. How the shape of glass helps substances to move around in ways that transform and intensify. I read about how the earliest experiments in alchemical work were probably in search of stronger alcohol. Dr. Bulb calls his works “systems” because of the way they are made to process certain rare substances. He is also filling the containers he makes. He seems to revel in the contradiction of the woodsy Portland craftsperson making dew collectors for herbalists but who isn’t afraid to work with uranium glass and nitrogen plasma. A look at his instagram hints at the diversity of his skills. Super-realistic glass eyes, a 30-foot tall 10-headed distillation device. A green-glowing bulb-based effigy to floresce and burn for an audience of fifty thousand in the desert. Fancy light bulbs for bars.

Kehde Roelofs has an enduring respect for tradition, expertise, hard work and focus, and has gone through training and mentorship and deep research to learn the craft of making lab-ready scientific glass, to craft obscure glass sculpture, to recreate historical light bulbs elevated to fine art, to learn the ways of alchemy where matter and energy and the self are formed and reformed. He says of his glasscraft that he is “evoking and reifing older forms.” From one perspective, he is a skilled craftsman with some super-obscure skills, but at the same time is a breaker of rules and glass. “A bad-boy skull crusher,” he calls himself. A burning man early adopter. The second time I talked to him and asked about what he is most excited by, he said practicing calligraphy which he is getting better at, and learning to play the twelve string guitar which he figures he might never be really good at. We talked a lot about how to keep learning as an adult. Part of his technique seems to be