Jen Elek: Reflecting, Magnifying and Representing Bold Color in Hot Glass
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Release Date: 04/22/2026
Studio Glass Pioneers Joey Kirkpatrick and Flora C. Mace: Inventing Processes to Realize Ideas
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Joey Kirkpatrick and Flora C. Mace consistently invite us to enter a meditative state. Whatever the medium, each piece seems to raise more questions than provide answers. The artists, respected for their innovative work, have concluded the series for which they are most known, large-scale blown glass fruit and vegetable forms. Their subsequent work includes life-size figurative wood and glass sculptures as well as outdoor bronze installations and glass work that features blown vessels and cast panels with illustrations of the ‘first facts’ of bird identification realized through...
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Jesse Olwen Stained Glass: Wrapping New Flesh on the Bones of An Ancient Craft
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
In a heartbreakingly dark and beautiful panel depicting the Statue of Liberty afloat in a pond amongst lily pads, water grasses and small frogs, Jesse Olwen reveals his inner sadness about the state of affairs in the US and wider world today. Though the most recent, this is not the only one of his works to reference Memento Mori– a Latin phrase meaning, remember that you have to die. Olwen is a stained glass artist based in Montreal, working at the intersection of traditional craftsmanship and contemporary visual culture. His work reinterprets historic techniques through...
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Documenting Laura Donefer's Glass Fashion Show
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Laura Donefer is known for artwork that pushes boundaries by exploring memory, assault, bereavement, joy and madness. Celebrated for her innovative, colorful blown glass and flameworked Amulet Baskets, the artist has been using glass as the primary medium in her work for over 40 years, all while teaching, promoting the glass arts worldwide, and producing her unforgettable Glass Fashion Show (GFS). Donefer has produced 15 of her extraordinary fashion shows, many for the Glass Art Society (GAS). In fact, at GAS Murano 2018, her remarkable and ground-breaking event included 33 glass costumes worn...
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Jen Elek: Reflecting, Magnifying and Representing Bold Color in Hot Glass
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Investigating interpersonal themes and the notion of community, Jen Elek is a studio artist and educator based in Seattle, Washington. She creates objects and installations of colorful glass and neon light employed as a form of non-verbal communication. Her most recent glass series titled Doliums is inspired by large Roman clay storage containers. Elek received her BFA from Alfred University in Metal and Hot Glass sculpture in 1994, after training as a welder in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She was a student of Michael Scheiner, Dante Marioni, and Ann Wahlstrom at Pilchuck...
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Ariana Makau and Nzilani Glass Conservation: At the Intersection of Equity, Preservation and Art
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Ariana Makau, founder of Nzilani Glass Conservation, was the second person in the world – and the first woman – to receive a Master’s Degree in Stained Glass Conservation from the Royal College of Art in London. Equally comfortable on a job site, at a board meeting or in a museum, Makau has over 30 years of experience with art and architectural preservation. Her work is most fulfilling at the intersection of equity, preservation and art. Nzilani Glass Conservation is an award-winning firm and one of the few companies in the United States qualified to create new or preserve...
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Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend: Stretching Concepts and Pushing Processes of Traditional Glass
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend is an artist for whom ideas have always been more important than media, and possibly more integral to her work. It’s interesting then that her art has been consistently viewed through the lens of glass. In the creation of her early X series to more recent Calendar Notations, she has pioneered techniques such as non-traditional, unfired painting on glass, mixing glass with other media, and presenting painted, decorated glass on the wall in reflected light. Throughout her career, the artist distilled her own life experiences in the creation of...
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Nadine Saylor: Telling Stories Behind the Objects, Places, and Lives They Touch
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Recently, Nadine Saylor has been creating a series of gas and oil cans featuring imagery of her local surroundings. These more “masculine” objects remind her of the things her grandfather had in his shed. In thinking about gender and how it relates to the objects with which we surround ourselves, she investigates what role gender plays in our world writ large. Assistant Professor of Glass and Sculpture at University of Nebraska, Kearney, Saylor is originally from Hershey, Pennsylvania. She received her BFA in Photography from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and her MFA in Glass...
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Rick Beck: Casting Large-Scale Industrial Objects and Figural Forms in Glass
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Rick Beck’s modern cast and carved figurative glass sculptures are inspired by industrial and architectural works as well as the human form, with an emphasis on formal aspects. Interested in playing the volumes of mass against the rhythm of the lines, Beck enjoys the interplay of the visual versus the verbal, creating art that challenges the eye as well as the mind. Beck states: “My wife, Valerie, got me a book about the competitive relationship between Picasso and Matisse. Their artistic dialogue about the figure has fired my imagination, especially the way they shared and borrowed images...
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The Pain and Pleasure of Karisa Gregorio’s Stained Glass
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
Karisa Gregorio’s autonomous stained glass panels explore themes of sex, death, God, the Devil, pleasure, temptation, intimacy, love, lust, and indulgence. The relationship between glass and light in stained glass allows her to create works that feel alive. Using traditional processes as well as techniques developed by modern stained glass master Judith Schaechter, the depth and intimacy of Gregorio’s materials create a world in which the pleasures of the flesh and emotions of the heart are equally illuminated and illuminating. Having received her BFA in Craft + Material studies, with a...
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Stephen Dee Edwards: Studio Glass Pioneer, Glass Caster, Educator
Talking Out Your Glass podcast
info_outlineInvestigating interpersonal themes and the notion of community, Jen Elek is a studio artist and educator based in Seattle, Washington. She creates objects and installations of colorful glass and neon light employed as a form of non-verbal communication. Her most recent glass series titled Doliums is inspired by large Roman clay storage containers.
Elek received her BFA from Alfred University in Metal and Hot Glass sculpture in 1994, after training as a welder in Allentown, Pennsylvania. She was a student of Michael Scheiner, Dante Marioni, and Ann Wahlstrom at Pilchuck Glass School, and studied with Maestro Lino Tagliapietra at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. In addition to creating her own work, Elek has assisted glass artists such as Dale Chihuly, Kiki Smith, Preston Singletary, and Tagliapietra, on whose team she worked as a key member for 15 years. A vibrant contemporary glass artist, she exhibits alongside artists of other mediums, breaking some of the barriers that have kept glass in the realm of craft and offering it as a worthy medium of contemporary art.
A member of the Northwest artist community, Elek’s involvement in art organizations includes: Pilchuck Glass School, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Hilltop Artists, and as a guest lecturer at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Tacoma Art Museum, Pittsburgh Glass Center, and Traver Gallery in Seattle. Elek maintains a studio in south Seattle with husband Jeremy Bert, a Pacific Northwest neon artist with whom she collaborated on their project Illuminated Forest as well as a permanent public installation titled The Illuminated Palouse for the Port of Seattle, located near the D gates at SeaTac International Airport.
Utilizing blown furnace glass, Elek creates sculptural objects that display the material’s ability to reflect, magnify and represent bold color. Traditional and innovative processes combine in her work to create colorful landscapes of glass. In the spring of 2017, she was awarded the Pilchuck Artist at Work Residency where she developed a new body of work titled Visual Fun, which highlighted the infallibility and vibrant colors of glass.
Elek has traveled to Canada, Japan, Australia, and throughout the United States teaching glassblowing workshops. In 2026 she will be an instructor at Tulsa Glassblowing School, Tulsa, Oklahoma, May 14 – 19, residency May 20 – 23; at UrbanGlass, Brooklyn, New York, June 23 – 27; and at the Studio of the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, August 31 – September 5. She will be a gaffer at Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington, July 9 – 26.