Born from a two week class at the Corning Museum of Glass, "The Time Machine" is a rare collaborative piece from Hoobs and Coyle built entirely within the museum's studio during the 'Elevated Designs' program. The artists arrived with a rough concept, then designed and executed the final form live, in real time, alongside a full class of students and faculty.
The result is a functioning clock and pipe, a piece that treats timekeeping and smoking function as equal design problems rather than a novelty mashup. A dual chamber percolator pairs with a dual bowl setup, giving two independent load points that filter through separate chambers before converging. A built in drain keeps the piece easy to maintain, letting water and residue clear without disassembly.
"Could not be happier with how this turned out."Hoobs
What makes this piece notable is its process as much as its function. It was conceived and built under real time constraints inside one of the most storied glass institutions in the country, with finishing details completed alongside fellow artists Glass By Who, Henry B Glass, and Jamms Glass in the final hours of the class. That collaborative pressure shows up in the piece's confidence: nothing about it reads as rushed, despite the compressed timeline.
For collectors interested in functional glass with a genuine studio provenance, "The Time Machine" represents a specific moment, a specific class, and a specific creative risk that paid off.
