Mathieu Grodet: Expressing Complex Modern Themes via Multi-Disciplinary Glass Works
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Using over 17,500 letters of handmade murrine tiles, Mathieu Grodet composed La Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, which translated means the Declaration of Human Rights, which was written in 1789. Recreated in mosaic style, dark red was used to represent blood, with the ivory-colored background symbolizing the ivory tower that freedom must be taken from. Intense attention to detail combined with a contemporary message defines Grodet’s multi-disciplinary works in glass. A French-born artist living and working in Canada, Grodet also creates thin and elegant...
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Joshua Hershman: Combining Casting, Coldworking and Photography in Groundbreaking Sculpture
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
An American born artist dedicated to developing new techniques of glass working, Joshua Hershman combines optical physics with the fluidity of glass to make his contemporary sculpture. By harnessing light though hand-polished lenses, he employs unique methods of casting, coldworking, and photography in his boundary pushing work. Hershman states: “My work offers meditations on the complexities within the concept of photography and the repercussions of the camera’s impact on culture. The incredibly creative and destructive nature of photography is both inspiring and alarming to me. It...
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Kari Russell-Pool: Flameworking Glass Heirlooms
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Primarily a flameworker, Kari Russell-Pool approaches her work in a painterly fashion. She is interested in the transformation of an object into an heirloom. Made from hand-pulled glass rods, her Safety Mom Series, for example, was inspired by post-September 11 ideas of keeping a family safe. That series, in incongruously cheerful colors, is dominated by images of guns and keys, and the delicate glasswork is patterned to look like traditional needlework, which kept women’s hands busy in the 18th and 19th centuries. For her Trophy Series, Russell-Pool flameworked a strikingly delicate and...
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Dylan Martinez: Glass Sculpture Confronting the Limits of Perception
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
At the heart of Dylan Martinez’s work lies the striking H2O/SiO2 series, inspired by the artistic tradition of Trompe L’œil—the technique that deceives the eye into perceiving three-dimensional objects on a flat surface. Each sculpture is meticulously hot-sculpted and hand-molded by Martinez, capturing the fluid movement of rising bubbles and the delicate form of what appears, at first glance, to be bags of water. These pieces transcend objecthood; they are immersive experiences that invite stillness, inspection, and recalibration of the senses. Martinez reflects, “Our vision has the...
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Melissa Janda: Sharing Willet Studios’ Gems at AGG Conference
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
As lead painter and art department manager for Willet Studios in Winona, Minnesota, Melissa Janda will speak about Willet’s large-scale projects at the upcoming American Glass Guild Conference, being held in Mesa, Arizona, from May 22 – 24, 2025. With 30 years of experience in the field of stained glass, Janda is adept at all aspects of stained glass production, specializing in glass painting, design and restoration work. From St. Agnes Catholic Church in Key Biscayne, Florida, to St. Jane de Chantal Catholic Church, Bethesda, Maryland, the results are stunning and speak...
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Meggy Wilm: Artist and Owner of Colorado Glass Works, D&L Art Glass Supply
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
One of the most followed stained glass artists on social media, Meggy Wilm of Colorado Glass Works, Boulder, Colorado, shares her creations with nearly 275K (and growing) followers on Instagram – attracting a new audience of young enthusiasts to the medieval craft. Wilm and her husband Dustin Mayfield also recently purchased Boulder-based D&L Art Glass Supply from Leslie Silverman, who dedicated 50 years to the company she founded. Experienced entrepreneurs, Wilm and Mayfield have a deep appreciation for the art glass industry and a forward-thinking vision for...
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Murano’s Ferro Brothers: Carved in Glass
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Working with abrasive spinning wheels, the Ferro brothers cold work glass vessels in brilliant colors. Their dramatic cuts are sometimes five layers deep, and they cradle each piece for hours, days, and often weeks, painstakingly grinding away to reveal what lies underneath. There is always the danger that the piece will shatter, so it is a painstaking process. The finished vessel is a passionate work of art in vibrant translucent colors and energetic textures. Pietro and Riccardo Ferro were born in 1975 and 1980, respectively. Under the guidance of their father, cold-working Maestro Paolo...
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Stephanie Trenchard: Casting Womens’ Narratives in Glass
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Stephanie Trenchard’s multi-disciplinary creative process includes painting and poetry along with cast glass. With a focus on biographical stories of how women artists have navigated careers and partnerships, motherhood and making a living while still focusing on their creative practice, the work also discusses the price the art has to pay in this grand juggling act. The artist prioritizes the actual experience of the work, making and seeing it, over the classification of genre or ownership of an idea. Says Trenchard: “I create my own visual vocabulary in storytelling. Using...
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Joyce J. Scott: Repositioning Craft as a Forceful Stage for Social Commentary and Activism
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
For more than three decades, trailblazing artist and activist Joyce J. Scott has elevated the creative potential of beadwork as a relevant contemporary art form. Scott uses off-loom, hand-threaded glass beads to create striking figurative sculptures, wall hangings, and jewelry informed by her African American ancestry, the craft traditions of her family (including her mother, renowned quilter Elizabeth T. Scott), and traditional Native American techniques, such as the peyote stitch. Each object that Scott creates is a unique, vibrant, and challenging work of art developed with imagination,...
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Studio Glass Pioneer Joel Philip Myers
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
self-described loner, Joel Philip Myers developed his skills in relative isolation from the Studio Glass movement. With works inspired by a vast array of topics ranging from his deep love of the Danish countryside to Dr. Zharkov, the artist avoided elaborate sculpture in favor of substantial vessels that are simple yet powerful. States Myers: “In 1964, on the occasion of an exhibition titled Designed for Production: The Craftsman’s Approach, I wrote in an essay in Craft Horizons magazine: ‘My approach to glass, as it is to clay, is to allow the material an...
info_outlineIrene Frolic: Personal History, Memory, and the Interdependence of Beauty and Decay
In 1948 at the age of 7, Irene Frolic arrived in Canada after almost three years in a United Nations refugee camp in Salzburg, Austria. A Jewish child, who had miraculously survived the grimmest of Grimm Fairy tales in the dark heart of Europe, arrived not knowing a word of English into a new world. Trying to make sense of these mysteries remains at the heart of her work in cast glass to this day.
The little Canadian girl grew into a well-educated young woman. Frolic married, travelled the world, had children, and held a good job before discovering glass in her early 40s, inspiring a sea change witnessed in her evolution to becoming an artist. Almost 40 years later, Frolic continues to infuse her cast glass with knowledge, feelings, history and heritage.
Working from her Toronto studio, Frolic has been involved in the international Studio Glass movement, helping to develop the art of kiln cast glass as a material for artistic expression by teaching workshops, lecturing and exhibiting world-wide. Past president of the Glass Art Association of Canada (GAAC), which honored her with a Lifetime Achievement award, she is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art (RCA). Her work is exhibited internationally and found in many public and private collections, including those of the Museum of Decorative Art, Lausanne, Switzerland, Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Museo del Vidreo, Monterrey, Mexico, and the Canadian Clay and Glass Gallery, Waterloo, Ontario.
Glass, which surrounds us in our modern urban landscape, is one of the most ancient, seductive and mysterious of materials. The quest to find a way to use it beyond its easy allure has propelled Frolic and has sustained her 40-year art career. By developing and exploring the emotive qualities of glass as a medium, she has explored her personal history, commented on memory, and mused on the interdependence of beauty and decay.
As the Covid pandemic continues, new sculpture is underway at Frolic’s studio. Her latest work, She Loves Us Still: Earth, addresses humanity’s treatment of our planet and each other. She says: “It goes back to my beginnings and how close I came to be extinguished. On October 13, 1941, in my hometown, Stanislawow, at nine weeks of age I was held in my 18-year-old mother’s arms, at the edge of an enormous hastily dug pit at the Jewish cemetery. I understand it was bitterly cold. The thousands of people herded there were all naked. The shooting continued all day – 12,000 Jewish citizens met their deaths that day. The reason I am still here, approaching my 80th year, is that it got dark…too dark to kill. I am full of anguish about the way we treat each other today. If strangers live among you, love the stranger as yourself and do him no harm. Love the stranger, both within and without.”