hn Cook graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1968, the first of a new generation to benefit from the ‘hot glass’ techniques brought to London from America by Sam Herman. Herman, who came to Britain in 1965, had been involved with the so-called ‘studio glass’ movement, which emerged in America in the early 1960s. This took glass production out of the factory and into the studio by using small furnaces to melt glass, allowing individuals to work with glass as an artistic medium. Cook founded the glass course at Leicester Polytechnic in 1970 and moved from free-blown hot glass such as this piece, blown on the blow-pipe without the use of moulds, to sand-casting, in which molten glass was poured into a negative mould made of sand.