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_outlineIndisputably one of the most renowned artists in the industry today, Elbo is co-owner of Everdream Studio in Evergreen, Colorado, where he works alongside a number of top industry artists. Having made a name for himself in the pipe world via his dinosaur motif and diverse portfolio of original design work, he says: “My work is an attempt to transcend the function of the pipe by giving my very self to the process. I am led through the open field of my medium by personal life experiences and my reaction to the relationships in my life.”
Beyond art creation, Elbo’s cutting-edge approach to business and marketing has made him one of the most popular and best-selling pipe artists, with an Instagram following of 240K. His business interests and ventures have included everything from Bitcoin to NFTs (non-fungible tokens). In association with Blunt Action, Elbo experimented with the potential for an augmented reality app, which would provide an immersive way for users to experience a 3D computer-generated reality to interact with his creations through their iOS devices. In response to his travels in Japan, the artist also began making plush and vinyl toys, some 4-feet tall, further entrenching the Elbo brand in the hearts and minds of fans and followers.
In 2005, Elbo began working with soft glass in the hot shop at Tyler School of Art and Architecture in his hometown of Philly. It wasn’t until after he graduated in 2009 that he started working with borosilicate glass and making pipes. He credits Zach Puchowitz with early inspiration and lessons on the torch. After running his own successful studio, in 2014 Elbo and JOP! opened Front Street Gallery in Kensington, Philadelphia. The gallery endeavored to bring the city’s most influential, beloved glass artists into the limelight allowing fans and collectors to admire and purchase their newest work. It was essentially a who’s-who of modern flameworking, featuring Philly artists like Zach Puchowitz, Snic Barnes, Marble Slinger (of Degenerate Art fame), Just Another Glassblower, and more. Front Street Gallery helped put Philadelphia on the map as a destination for the ever-growing glassblowing movement.
In 2013, Elbo relocated to Colorado and became one of a stable of the industry’s best glassblowers including WJC, Eusheen, Adam G, and N8 Miers working at Everdream Studio. Created as a space for all creatives not just glass, the studio provides a secluded environment with not many distractions, enabling Elbo to focus on his craft and the development of art.
Pipe making represents the American renaissance of sculptural art, Elbo believes. “I want pipe making to be synonymous with high-end art, but I don’t believe it’s there yet. I thought it was, but the more I’m exposed to true high-end art, I see that pipe making has a long way to go. The biggest hurdle we have to get over is the close-mindedness in the industry. We need to take bigger risks, create things not for other people to see but what we want to see. If people begin to do that in our industry, it will naturally evolve into a higher form of art.”