Glass artist Susan Taylor Glasgow lectures at MU

She reflected on her beginnings in art and past and present projects.

By Megan Donohue

Published Sept. 25, 2009

Susan Taylor Glasgow gave a lecture Wednesday on her art and her life story in the Fine Arts Building.

"Maybe it's hard to talk about my work because glass is my mode of communication," Glasgow said. "Its creation is my mode of expression. Where poets have words, I have glass."

To adequately explain her work, Glasgow needed to give her life story, which starts with her mother, the motivation behind her art.

"I now sew in an unyielding medium, cook uneatable creations and stitch breakable clothing," Glasgow said. "I often wonder what she would think of my misguided domestic talents and my decision to be an artist over a good homemaker."

After owning a seamstress shop called On Pins and Needles for some time, Glasgow devoted herself to turning her hobby of creating art out of glass into a full blown career.

"My work had evolved beyond an ex-seamstress now glass artist," Glasgow said. "It was domesticity gone awry. Armed with finely helmed but misguided homemaking skills, my work exercises the motions and notions of the feminine ideal but in a contrary material offering conflicting messages of comfort and expectations."

As her work developed, she began to create her own style.

"Typically I like to work in a series so I don't have to jam all of the ideas that I have about a piece into the first object," Glasgow said. "Once I get a pattern and a mold to match each other, I like to continue with the series until I have worked out all of the complexities."

When she closes a series, she keeps the last piece for her collection to both enjoy and send to museums.

After her last artist's residency with the Pittsburg Glass Center, Glasgow created the communal nest. The nest explores the natural tendency of women to nest and the inclinations of safety and shelter, the artist said.

"A big component of the communal nest was that it was not be built just by me, but also by the community around it," Glasgow said. "With that in mind, I asked artists from around the world to contribute glass twigs to the communal nest."

The small twigs on the interior of the nest are from international artists, the farthest from Australia. The large clear twigs were donated by Jason Forck of the Pittsburgh Glass Center, and gain their shiny quality as they were pulled straight from the furnace. Finally, the large frosty ones were made by Glasgow, and look frosted due to their contact with the mold.

Women from the Bethlehem Haven in Pittsburgh attended a glass-making shop and made twigs, as will women from the McCambridge Center and other similar shelters.

"Susan Taylor Glasgow has said that she would take a few of our clients and actually do a master class with them, meaning she would teach them glass making techniques and they would be able to make their own twigs that would actually go into the communal nest," McCambridge Center Director Beth Berhorst said.

Women from these centers not only appreciate the support Glasgow is generating in her art, but also her willingness to work with them and allow them to be a part of it, Berhorst said.

"We cannot thank her enough for taking the time to come here and taking a month at least to be here and be a part of this and work with our clients," Berhorst said. "We are very grateful to her and what she's doing."

Glasgow employs a unique technique in her art of putting holes in the glass, or "sewing glass" as she calls it.

She said she recently gave up her patent on the technique, but has not yet taught a workshop on the technique, in part because she is not yet ready to let the technique go and wants there to be no confusion as to who invented it, and also because the process is a lengthy one to learn.

It takes a year to train one assistant, so she cannot yet see how she will condense the technique into a one-week workshop, she said.

In closing, Glasgow gave a few words of advice to artists.

"You have to decide for yourself what you want from your art," Glasgow said. "Decide what you want, keep working towards your goal and remind yourself to get back on track if you meander."