Michael Endo: Using Kiln Formed Glass to Explore the Spaces in Between
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
An abandoned, dilapidated swimming pool in the forest. A pile of trash smoldering in a secluded backyard. A dark and deserted highway flanked by an unexplained light. Michael Endo’s kiln formed glass is about the potential of empty spaces and how people inhabit the subliminal area between the civilized world and wilderness. It begs the question: Is our world real or manufactured? Says Endo: “Locked in a loop of familiarity and strangeness, my gestural paintings, drawings, glasswork and sculptures exist in a moment of tension. By depicting the boundary between a wild space and the...
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Ethan Stern: The Revealing Quality of Glass Carving
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Ethan Stern’s work is rooted in traditional craftsmanship, contemporary design, and a deep connection to the natural environment. As a glass artist, he draws inspiration from historic craft traditions such as cut crystal and classical ceramic design, while reinterpreting these forms through a modern lens. His practice seeks to explore the interplay between utility, beauty, and narrative, bridging the realms of functional objects and sculptural expression. Stern states: “Central to my approach is the concept of light as a dynamic medium. Glass, with its inherent ability to refract, reflect,...
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Chaiah Sullivan: The Cactus Guy
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Chaiah (pronounced ‘Kaya’) Sullivan has been impressing the glass world and Instagram followers with his beautiful and intricate cactus-inspired functional glass to the tune of a 94K following and growing. He came upon the cactus after a friend mistakenly referred to another plant pipe he had created as a cactus and decided to give making a realistic cactus pipe a try. “I never really expected to be the cactus guy,” Sullivan says. Growing up in Paonia, a small town on the Western Slope of Colorado, Sullivan first discovered flameworking in 2005 at age 14. Two years later, he started...
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Zachary Layhew and Hoseok Youn: Rise of the Tradition
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
At the Glass Art Society’s (GAS) 2025 conference, Trailblazing New Traditions, held in May in Arlington and Fort Worth, Texas, Zachary Layhew and Hoseok Youn presented a unique collaborative glassblowing demonstration where Youn’s Venetian fantasy vessels intersected with the baroque, cubist influences of Layhew’s practice. The artists shared their unique approaches to traditional techniques and designs, both makers transforming the context of tradition through the lens of their original personalities. The result was a figurative sculpture constructed from historical goblets and...
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Richard Prigg: Celebrating the Textures, Colors, Voices of his Materials
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Author and architectural glass artist Robert Sowers wrote that lead should be considered a design element and not just a matrix to hold stained glass. That idea spoke to Richard Prigg, who has developed a body of work that celebrates lead and solder as much as it does breathtakingly beautiful glass. Though historically stained glass windows conveyed the teachings of the church, Prigg’s work intentionally tells no stories, but rather impacts the viewer by combining more expressive lead work with various light-modulating elements of and beyond the window itself. States Prigg: “I have an...
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Jason Christian: Modern Simplicity Meets Classical Venetian
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Jason Christian’s work pushes the boundaries of his craft, combining the delicate complexity of reticello with intricate detailing inspired by Fabergé eggs. Through series such as his Bumbershoots and Yo-Yos that reflect classic Venetian technique to more sculptural works including Dragons and Volpe, Christian’s art is deeply influenced by his family, personal experiences, and the nostalgia of growing up in the Pacific Northwest. A renowned glass artist based in the Seattle area, Christian was born in 1976 on Whidbey Island, Washington, to a metal...
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Beth Lipman: Tracking Deep Time and the Anthropocene through Still Life Assemblage
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Beth Lipman is an American artist whose sculptural practice generates from the Still Life genre, symbolically representing the splendor and excess of the Anthropocene and the stratigraphic layer humanity will leave on earth. Assemblages of inanimate objects and domestic interiors, inspired by private spaces and public collections, propose portraits of individuals, institutions, and societies. Through works in glass, wood, metal, photography, and video, Lipman presents a meditation on our relationship to Deep Time, a monumental time scale based on geologic events that minimizes human...
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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...
info_outlineKeke Cribbs: Frozen Moments in the Emotional Adventure of Life
Through her art, KeKe Cribbs searches for a peaceful place. Growing up, this self-taught artist moved 24 times in 24 years, and she now prefers to travel in her mind, telling stories of far-away places and exotic characters in a mosaic glass technique she has adapted to her unique style. From her studio on Whidbey Island off the coast of Seattle come boats, Moon Queens, and collage with painted glass, inspiring wonder and delight in all who view them. Her latest works will be on view August 6 – 29, 2021 at the Bainbridge Arts and Crafts Gallery, Bainbridge, Washington.
Like her work, Cribbs’ life has a fairytale-quality with dark undertones. At age 15, she was one of five children transplanted to Ireland for her mother’s graduate studies in Yeats. For the next decade she traveled from place to place in Europe before returning to the United States as a single mother and a stranger to native customs. While working in a Native American art gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Cribbs discovered the work of the Mimbres Indians and had a show of her adapted renditions of those drawings at Dewey Kofron Gallery in 1980. She was subsequently commissioned to reproduce the images by etching them onto the glass fronts of a suite of cabinets.
In 1997, in a dramatic departure from sandblasting, Cribbs began firing enamels onto glass in a kiln. She drew on the glass with a quill pen and used sgraffito to further enhance the drawing before firing. Working the entire piece on the reverse side of the glass left the colors brilliant and wet in appearance. The sheets of painted glass were then cut into tiny tiles and reassembled on a three-dimensional surface. Early forms included canteens, baskets, high-heel shoes or more commonly, boats.
Says Cribbs: “All of these forms represent journeys – the canteen and basket forms are containers which one would carry on a journey to hold water, the very essence of life. The narratives depicted on these forms represent the choices we make in this life; small vignettes into fictional lives that may remind one of a
Keke Cribbs: Frozen Moments in the Emotional Adventure of Life
Through her art, KeKe Cribbs searches for a peaceful place. Growing up, this self-taught artist moved 24 times in 24 years, and she now prefers to travel in her mind, telling stories of far-away places and exotic characters in a mosaic glass technique she has adapted to her unique style. From her studio on Whidbey Island off the coast of Seattle come boats, Moon Queens, and collage with painted glass, inspiring wonder and delight in all who view them. Her latest works will be on view August 6 – 29, 2021 at the Bainbridge Arts and Crafts Gallery, Bainbridge, Washington.
Like her work, Cribbs’ life has a fairytale-quality with dark undertones. At age 15, she was one of five children transplanted to Ireland for her mother’s graduate studies in Yeats. For the next decade she traveled from place to place in Europe before returning to the United States as a single mother and a stranger to native customs. While working in a Native American art gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Cribbs discovered the work of the Mimbres Indians and had a show of her adapted renditions of those drawings at Dewey Kofron Gallery in 1980. She was subsequently commissioned to reproduce the images by etching them onto the glass fronts of a suite of cabinets.
In 1997, in a dramatic departure from sandblasting, Cribbs began firing enamels onto glass in a kiln. She drew on the glass with a quill pen and used sgraffito to further enhance the drawing before firing. Working the entire piece on the reverse side of the glass left the colors brilliant and wet in appearance. The sheets of painted glass were then cut into tiny tiles and reassembled on a three-dimensional surface. Early forms included canteens, baskets, high-heel shoes or more commonly, boats.
Says Cribbs: “All of these forms represent journeys – the canteen and basket forms are containers which one would carry on a journey to hold water, the very essence of life. The narratives depicted on these forms represent the choices we make in this life; small vignettes into fictional lives that may remind one of a surreal dream or experience, a palpitation of the heart, a frozen moment in the emotional adventure of life.”
Eventually, Cribbs found herself seeking more information and attended workshops at Pilchuck Glass School with Dan Dailey, Bertil Vallien, Ginny Ruffner, Klaus Moje, Clifford Rainey, and Jiří Harcuba. She studied ceramics with Yih-Wen Kuo, Keisuke Mizuno, and Sergei Isupov at Penland School of Craft and attended many classes at Pratt Fine Art Center in Seattle studying metal techniques. She moved to Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound to be closer to the heart of the glass community. In time, she found herself teaching at both Pilchuck and Penland as well as starting a glass program at the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, MA, which then became Southeastern Massachusetts University (SMU), now UMass at Dartmouth.
Anyone who learns something has to be curious enough to retain the information, no matter where it comes from. In Cribbs’ case, her life experiences and fascination with process led to the development of a unique approach to making art work, one in which the mystery surrounding objects from the past creates its own narrative in the mind of the onlooker. Working in many materials including glass and ceramics, she seeks to create an interactive form of storytelling, sculpturally producing shapes with narrative surfaces, bringing the whole work into a multifaceted exploration of the subconscious world of dreams and symbols.
With a career spanning over 51 years, Cribbs has work in many museum collections both nationally and internationally, including the L.A. County Museum, CA; Corning Glass Museum, Corning, NY; Henry Ford Art Museum, Dearborn, MI; Mobile Art Museum, Mobile, AL; Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI; and Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan. Each year from 2012-2015 Cribbs was nominated for the Twinning Humber Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2010, she was awarded Artist in Residence at the Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA; Artist in Residence, Toledo Art Museum; and was a presenter at the Glass Art Society Conference, Seattle, WA.
About her new work, Cribbs states: “I’m really happy with the new work I am producing for the show in August at BAC on Bainbridge Island. Technically I have moved to paintings with painted glass inclusions. Perhaps it is partially the isolation during the time of COVID that has pushed me to isolate each little jewel of glass so it can be appreciated individually as its own micro painting, loved for being itself …. but the departure from creating a full skin of mosaic glass on a form, be it sculptural or flat, has other aspects of elevating these small shards of what was simply float glass and mirror bits, to a placement of honor.
“In a society that tends to look down on poverty and to isolate those who have less, I am always reminded of the song line diamonds on the soles of her shoes by Paul Simon … and then there is Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds by the Beatles …. coal to diamonds to dust to stars where all the good souls go to sing together; these contribute to the access point where I have landed with this new work, and I am in bliss heaven.”
On May 27, 2021, join Artist Trust Board Member Lee Campbell and artist Kéké Cribbs for a virtual house party in support of Artist Trust. This virtual event won’t be your typical Zoom call, but will instead provide an exclusive tour of Cribbs’ Whidbey Island studio, insight to her artistic process, and a glimpse of her recent work. Come prepared to laugh, think outside the box, and hear more about one of Washington State’s talented artists.
https://artisttrust.cheerfulgiving.com/e/an-evening-with-lee-campbell-and-keke-cribbs
surreal dream or experience, a palpitation of the heart, a frozen moment in the emotional adventure of life.”
Eventually, Cribbs found herself seeking more information and attended workshops at Pilchuck Glass School with Dan Dailey, Bertil Vallien, Ginny Ruffner, Klaus Moje, Clifford Rainey, and Jiří Harcuba. She studied ceramics with Yih-Wen Kuo, Keisuke Mizuno, and Sergei Isupov at Penland School of Craft and attended many classes at Pratt Fine Art Center in Seattle studying metal techniques. She moved to Whidbey Island in the Puget Sound to be closer to the heart of the glass community. In time, she found herself teaching at both Pilchuck and Penland as well as starting a glass program at the Swain School of Design in New Bedford, MA, which then became Southeastern Massachusetts University (SMU), now UMass at Dartmouth.
Anyone who learns something has to be curious enough to retain the information, no matter where it comes from. In Cribbs’ case, her life experiences and fascination with process led to the development of a unique approach to making art work, one in which the mystery surrounding objects from the past creates its own narrative in the mind of the onlooker. Working in many materials including glass and ceramics, she seeks to create an interactive form of storytelling, sculpturally producing shapes with narrative surfaces, bringing the whole work into a multifaceted exploration of the subconscious world of dreams and symbols.
With a career spanning over 51 years, Cribbs has work in many museum collections both nationally and internationally, including the L.A. County Museum, CA; Corning Glass Museum, Corning, NY; Henry Ford Art Museum, Dearborn, MI; Mobile Art Museum, Mobile, AL; Racine Art Museum, Racine, WI; and Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan. Each year from 2012-2015 Cribbs was nominated for the Twinning Humber Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2010, she was awarded Artist in Residence at the Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA; Artist in Residence, Toledo Art Museum; and was a presenter at the Glass Art Society Conference, Seattle, WA.
About her new work, Cribbs states: “I’m really happy with the new work I am producing for the show in August at BAC on Bainbridge Island. Technically I have moved to paintings with painted glass inclusions. Perhaps it is partially the isolation during the time of COVID that has pushed me to isolate each little jewel of glass so it can be appreciated individually as its own micro painting, loved for being itself …. but the departure from creating a full skin of mosaic glass on a form, be it sculptural or flat, has other aspects of elevating these small shards of what was simply float glass and mirror bits, to a placement of honor.
“In a society that tends to look down on poverty and to isolate those who have less, I am always reminded of the song line diamonds on the soles of her shoes by Paul Simon … and then there is Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds by the Beatles …. coal to diamonds to dust to stars where all the good souls go to sing together; these contribute to the access point where I have landed with this new work, and I am in bliss heaven.”
On May 27, 2021, join Artist Trust Board Member Lee Campbell and artist Kéké Cribbs for a virtual house party in support of Artist Trust. This virtual event won’t be your typical Zoom call, but will instead provide an exclusive tour of Cribbs’ Whidbey Island studio, insight to her artistic process, and a glimpse of her recent work. Come prepared to laugh, think outside the box, and hear more about one of Washington State’s talented artists.
https://artisttrust.cheerfulgiving.com/e/an-evening-with-lee-campbell-and-keke-cribbs