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_outlineChaiah (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 working as an assistant at a local hotshop, North Rim Glass LLC. He practiced as a hobbyist while finishing high school, then put all his focus into glass. In 2010, he attended Penland School of Crafts, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. There he studied with Janis Miltenberger, a Washington-based artist who works with borosilicate glass to create large-scale narrative sculpture. Like Sullivan, much of Miltenberger’s glass art is inspired by botanical elements found in nature such as leaves and flowers.
In 2013, Sullivan took a series of collaborative classes at Glasscraft in Golden, Colorado, where he had the chance to learn from artists such as Salt and Robert Mickelsen, from whom he learned the hollow sculpting technique he uses today. Says Sullivan: “The inside of my pieces have the same contour as the outside. I put all my ridges in and then along each ridge I add dots; once those are all melted in, I pluck each spike out individually. Sometimes I do get a little sick of plucking thousands of spikes over and over and over again. But once you see all your work come to fruition, it makes it all worth it. There’s something about making it functional on top of it being a beautiful art piece that really pushes me.”
After learning many different styles and techniques, Sullivan explored and experimented to develop his own style of work under the name Unparalleled Glass. He was awarded Dr. Dabber Glass Masters 1st Place in 2023; the Puffco Glass Open 1st Place in 2022; and Champs’ Emerging Artist 1st Place in May 2017.
Enjoy this conversation about the progression of Sullivan’s cactus designs, the device attachments he’s been developing and his recently released foot pedals and oxygen systems. He also discusses recent lighting and installation pieces as well as some fun projects in the works.