Gemma Hollister: Narrative Structure and Divine Light
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Upon graduation from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture with a BFA in glass, Gemma Hollister was awarded the Windgate-Lamar fellowship from the Center for Craft, which allowed her and her partner to start a small studio in Philadelphia, Antolini Glass Co. While balancing her personal artistic practice and work as a production glassblower, the artist recently appeared on Netflix’s Blown Away: Extreme Heat. The show inspired new work, which she made both in her own studio and during a residency at Monterey Glassworks. States Hollister: “Blown Away gave me a chance to...
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Hana Hastings, Sand and Fire Works: Using Social Networks to Successfully Market Stained Glass Patterns, Classes and Artwork
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Using Etsy for pattern sales, Patreon for teaching classes and Instagram for promoting her artwork, Hana Hastings, Sand and Fire Works, Grimsby, Ontario, Canada, has acquired a substantial following for her offerings in stained glass. Wanting to differentiate herself from the more traditional glass designs and commonly seen pattern work, Hastings brought nature and natural subjects into the homes of her patrons by experimenting with 3D sculpture and unique textures and colors of glass. Mastering her marketing efforts on social media, the artist grew a following significant enough to dedicate...
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Michael Meilahn: An Artist Farmer’s Focus on Corn and GMOs
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Michael (Mick) Meilahn’s body of work, which includes glass sculpture and large glass and multi-media installations, intertwines the artist’s investigation into agriculture, crop production, genetic food modification, and the ancient history of corn. Primordial Shift, a quintessential example of Meilahn’s later installations, consisted of 32 hand-blown glass ears of corn averaging 4-feet high, suspended on stalks of cord with leaves of cast bronze on a backdrop of video projected to create an illusion of gentle swaying in the breeze and surround-sound audio that included the...
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Austin Stern - 111325 3.40PM
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Austin Stern’s Little Monsters series is a body of work where cartoon-like creatures interact with physical manifestations of their own anxieties. These worries which assail the monsters, gleefully weighing down their minds and bodies, are simultaneously sinister and comical representations of our daily setbacks and stumbling blocks. By approaching this subject matter from a playful perspective, the viewer is invited to find the humor in the small battles we fight daily to find positivity, peace, and happiness. States Stern: “I am inspired by the bright and highly saturated...
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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...
info_outlineKim Thomas: The Escape and Beyond
A prolific borosilicate flameworker producing highly recognizable works in functional and sculptural glass, Kim Thomas aka Zii is changing the face of flameworking. From detailed and realistic human teeth and severed finger pipes to her latest kinetic sculpture, the artist is redefining what is possible at the torch. From January – April, 2021, recent works The Cloud Capturing Apparatus and The Cloud Riding Contraption were exhibited in Glass in The Expanded Field at the Hunterdon Art Museum, Clinton, New Jersey.
Thomas also participated in Hunterdon’s companion symposium, Pipe Art: Understudied Glass, which considered the glass pipe as a fluid work of art fundamental to the art history of glass. Celebrated artists Dan Coyle and Luken Sheafe, whose artist name is SALT, presented their intensely wrought, figural, and in the case of Thomas, sometimes kinetic, pipes. Joined by Susie J. Silbert, Curator at the Corning Museum of Glass, these artists further contextualized their work within the burgeoning field of pipe-making.
Following graduation from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in ceramics, Thomas attended The Make Up Designory and later worked as an assistant to award-winning special effects make-up artist Kevin Haney. In 2009, when she answered an advertisement for a studio apprentice in North Hollywood, California, Thomas discovered her passion for flameworking. With lessons from her studio mates and observation she quickly learned the medium and turned her practice into a career.
Now making work from the Urban Pheasant Glass Studio, Detroit, Michigan, Thomas is a former professor of glass at Salem Community College in New Jersey, and guest instructor at various schools and studios including Penland School of Craft, Snow Farm, and the Pilchuck School of Glass. She has demonstrated her techniques at The International Flameworking Conference and The Glass Art Society Conference, and exhibits her work in museums and galleries across the United States. Her attention to detail and regard for realism have resulted in a highly recognizable aesthetic signature. In a world where the inherent beauty of glass is regularly exploited, Thomas relies on a gritty realism to set her work apart. Few, if any, artists create similar work.
As Thomas continues to work on The Escape series – she prepares to teach classes at Penland School of Craft, July 18 – August 2 and Snow Farm from August 8 – 13. Both classes are full with waiting lists. She will also participate in an emerging artist residency at Pilchuck Glass School, October 6 – November 22, 2021.
Nicknamed after her classic 1978 Camaro Z28, Zii believes the most creative and engaging work is influenced by the things that find their way into your dreams. She says: “It’s easy with pipemaking to get pigeonholed into making one type of piece –- if you’re doing it as a living, you have to please your fans and make things they will buy. As an artist, if you want to grow and develop, and have some sort of message, you can’t just make one thing over and over.”