Becker works with
fused glass and found objects, creating intimate pieces that explore the connection between mind and body. Most recently she exhibited at the Moscow Artwalk with "Inside My Head", capturing the turmoil of living with a traumatic brain injury and using layers of glass, color and symbolic imagery expresses the abstract colliding with beauty. Becker developed an interest in
fused glass when she enrolled in an art therapy program at Idaho Elks Rehabilitation Hospital after suffering a head injury with multiple sensory damage in 2007. Her intentions were to express her frustrations in giving up the person she used to be and finding a new path with my new brain functions. A red dot appears on her art pieces, which is a symbolic honoring of the brain injury that set her on the path of creating art from inside her heart and mind.
Becker's fused glass work is both dimensional and tactile. Some messages are subtle and some more direct. Her style has been compared to Frank Lloyd Wright's modernist lines of architecture and Joan Miro, a modernist abstract artist from Barcelona Spain. Miro studied and worked with Pablo Picasso in Paris in the 1920's. Becker too embraces her style of playful art and child-like impression.
Becker's work has evolved from the painful darkness of loss to the joy and whimsy of being alive despite the difficulties of sensory connections. She is currently creating a life rhythms series showing the common flow of individuals despite subtle or obvious differences. She has also expanded her work to include recycled glass. Because of coefficient differences in previously used glass, this form is often unpredictable and more difficult to produce an end art piece, but she is enjoying experimenting with crushing previously used glass, firing the broken pieces and reconstructing a new art form.
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Life and the discovery of glass has been anything but ordinary for Saman Kalantari. Saman was born in Shiraz in Iran on 21st of September 1972 and raised during the revolution of Ayatollahs, Iran-Iraq war and many social conflicts in an absolutist state. In 1992 Saman started working as a ceramic artist since 1992 but had to flee his country in 2004 and since then has been living in Italy as a political refugee. Saman discovered glass in 2005 when he began a two-year course at Vetroricerca Glas & Modern in Bolzano. To Saman this material expressed his life: the social and political experiences of life both in Iran and in Europe. In 2007 he received his diploma and since then he has held several exhibitions and has been published in Glasshouse, an international magazine for studio-glass.
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Tina Kiker was born to glass. With her great grandfather, his father and uncle all glass blowers you might even say she has glass royalty in her veins. Tina believes glass isn't just about a hobby or fascination, although these are large parts of her enthusiasm for the art form, she says "A beautiful piece of glass work will make anyone stop and take notice. It picks up the light and calls to us like no other form of art can."
And so after a few generations lost, Tina is curving the generational road and pursuing a slightly different direction with lamp working and glass fusing, after making her first glass bead a few years ago.
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At 16 years old and already running her own fused glass business called Abstracted Faces, Caitlin Feldman creates one of a kind “abstracted faces”. She individually hand cuts, creates and designs abstracted faces using kiln formed fused glass. Geometric shapes are cut to give the character a more unusual, unique and funky look. Each face, eye color and eyelashes, lip shape and color, hair color and style, freckle is individually customized according to the character's personality.
Caitlin's abstracted faces range from a single to four faces on a background glass. She has always had a love for art, but never found her true niche until she started fusing with glass. Two years ago, she took a two week glass fusing and bead making camp class at Craft Alliance. The fusing caught her eye because it allowed her to be more creative. It was too difficult to cut circles out of glass, so she chose to do geometric shapes instead. Her faces are very abstract, unusual and different and she says her art is just a fun way of making people out of glass with a bit more style and personality to them.
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