What type of work do I make?
It's going to vary day to day, depending on one who's hiring me
or if I'm working for myself.
I'm a Seattle
based glass artist currently working off of Vashon Island.
And what we do here, we may make blown glass work for a variety of clients.
Hello and welcome.
Come on in.
This is a studio I share on Vashon Island,
and we're going to show you some of the pieces
I'm currently working on for Tiffany & Co.
What I've been doing
mostly recently is I've been hired by Tiffany and Company,
and so what I've been tasked with is working closely
with the creative director, and we go through and we're
leaning heavily into the history of
Tiffany Glass, and I have a lot of books that I research, and I pick from there,
and I kind of smash them together into this new thing
that has never been done before by Tiffany.
And over here is my team that won't shut up.
A Bucheimer, Edgar Valentine.
One of the best things about glassmaking is the community
and also picking your team, and they kind of pick you, too.
So, the first thing we start doing, just start off
the process is we're going to heat up some of this color bar.
We're going to put that on the blow pipe first.
So, how I got started in glass making.
I originally went to school at RIT
in Rochester, New York, and I was just studying industrial design.
I had a friend
that was actually in the glass program, and she took me to visit
the glassblowing studio.
And once I saw that, I was hooked.
I knew that that is what I wanted to do.
Okay, so the next thing we're going to do is add a layer of this
vanilla color.
We're going to wrap this thing on here.
I am going to put it like this.
The bubble's going to be right there and we're going to spiral this on.
It's gonna look really cool.
My first job in Seattle, I started working for Dale Chihuly.
I think I was 21, and I was working at a shop in New Orleans.
And when I was ready to leave there, I basically called one of the glass makers
that I had met working down there, basically just begged and harassed them
until I got a job on the small chandelier team with Dale Chihuly
that only worked on weekends and continue up the ladder their at Dale's.
So, I've got these horizontal lines right now.
So what I want to do is grab at the bottom just kind of pull it all up.
One of the biggest life changing events for me was realizing
that any time on the Chihuly team
we worked with these Italians, the work was just at another level.
And once I realized that that was happening, I decided
I wanted to move to Italy and work with these masters.
I think that almost a year that I spent there
working with them, it totally changed my relationship with material.
I handled it so much differently and people noticed
when I got back, you know, they were like kind of stunned,
even though I was only a year changed everything.
Why did I move from Seattle to Vashon?
I think like a lot of us are seeing this in Seattle,
there was a cultural ecosystem that I used to thrive in, especially in Georgetown,
which was this dirty little neighborhood
you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting an artist.
The flavor of the community that created these
these artists, these great works and the rents were just getting double.
So, I talked to my friend Brian out of fashion
and I said, you know, I don't want a community presence anymore.
I just will clearly work away
a small space that I could turn off and on as I have projects.
And so we what we did, we hybridize my studio with his studio,
and now we cohabitate in his space.
All right. So I got a nice surface heat on there
that way it won't
crack when we spray it with a room temperature liquid,
and we watch in here.
You're going to watch it change all kinds of colors.
Go ahead.
You know, a lot of us artists will call
ourselves storytellers, and I think I'm good at that.
And I think that, you know,
when you see these characters that I that I make, whether I'm spoon feeding you
a narrative for that story, you are going to have enough bits
and pieces there to create a story for yourself.
My work is just like the point of departure.
Where you land is kind of up to you. How's that?