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Grant Recipient

Details of a stained-glass dome made from soldered, layered flash glass.

Gemma Hollister

Windgate-Lamar Fellowship

2022

My glass work is an endless practice of creating fantastical objects, sculptures, and installations that center around themes of imagination and control, manifesting as both literal and abstract sculpture. Growing up in the Catholic church, I began to understand the beauty of glass and its role as a tool of narration and manipulation. A single material possessed the power to educate, inspire, and call to action those who observe it. In my practice, I manipulate traditional associations with stained glass — its narrative structure and divine light — by depicting and addressing contemporary issues related to modern technology that I want viewers to reflect upon. The act of creating stained glass is a protest against an unresolved and rapidly evolving technological world, as crafting meticulous manifestations of the things I fear gives me control over them. I create modular structures that are visually collapsed or consumed by another form, using blown glass to make physical the absurd forms of my imagination. My abstract blown glass brings to physical form a conversation between control and chaos through several traditional craft techniques. Painstakingly built origami structures bombarded with uncontrollable expanding foam are petrified and its form recreated and preserved in glass. To me, the whimsical contrast of these forms represents a moment between inflation and collapse and creates empathy from viewer to object, confirming their abstract feelings in physical form.

Bio of the Artist

Organization Background

Location

Newtown, PA

EDUCATION

Tyler School of Art and Architecture

SPECIALIZATION

Glass

Institution

Grant amount

$15,000

Also awarded

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Selected works

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