Artist Statement

"Simply put, glass excites me. There is nothing more exhilarating then working with glass and seeing the sheets or rods of glass come to life. The more I get frustrated with a finicky medium like glass, the more it charges me to tame this media.

I have 6 years of Kiln fusing & casting experience and about 2 years of flame working experience.

My appreciation for art glass started quite early in life. I grew up in a house that had many glass artifacts. As a kid I admired them and wondered how they were made. My father had a beautiful collection of glass animals that he had collected from his travels abroad. They were quite fragile and for obvious reasons, kids were not allowed to touch them. But I could still admire their beauty when sun was shining from behind them. They looked vibrant & alive.

As I got busy raising kids and making my career as a software engineer, I forgot all about glass. I did experience glimpses of happiness whenever I walked in to museums or stores that carried glass art & when I first made a stained glass piece many years ago.

After kids went off to college and I was getting tired of my high flying corporate career, an opportunity came knocking at my door when I saw a flyer from a community college which had a course titled, “Design through Illumination”. I read the course description and immediately registered. Still as ignorant as I was about glass, fortunately, my first glass teacher was Susan Longini. Susan sparked my interest in glass fusing & kiln casting. Since then I have not looked back. I took the course again and again, later with Carol Lawton. Slowly I started setting up my own workshop.

After glass fusing & casting for 4 years, my curiosity and thirst for learning more was getting the best of me. Again, Susan Longini came to my rescue and introduced me to Kathleen Elliot, who is a top-notch lampwork artist. Very graciously Kathleen spent 6 months with me in her own studio teaching me flameworking with borosilicate glass. I found this art to be a lot more frustrating than kilnfusing & casting. It needs much more coordination of eyes, hands, torch, temperature, etc. In spite of all the challenges, I love the fact that it requires my 110% concentration; no other activity in my life has required that from me. I had not known myself as having any passion as the one I feel for glass art.

Since then, I have set up a nice workshop for kilnwork and flamework, in which I have the freedom to spend endless number of hours & I actually do. I continue to work hard on perfecting the techniques I have learned & strive to learn new ones as I go along."