“It's just fantastic watching people work. The material is so hot and so dangerous, and yet it's like a beautiful dance when it works,” observes Session 3 Artist in Residence Anya Gallaccio. Relatively new to hot glass, Anya says she has enjoyed watching the students of Session 3 blow glass in the Hot Shop at the end of her day.  

Since our founding, Pilchuck’s Artist in Residence program has been an integral part of our programming. The residency welcomes artists of other mediums to Pilchuck to experience the vast array of possibilities within glass. Every session Pilchuck hosts Gaffers who work closely with the Artists in Residence (AiR) and their Artist Assistants (AA) to help bring their visions to life in glass. For many years, this residency has brought hundreds of artists from all over the world to experience the magic of glass and Pilchuck.  

In 2009, we began a partnership with the Museum of Glass and their Visiting Artist program to coordinate several artists each season to attend both of our residencies within the same summer. This collaboration creates the unique and extended opportunity for artists of other mediums to explore the material with support from some of the best glass makers and artists in the country and across several state-of-the-art facilities in our region.  

Anya Gallaccio is the first of the three AiRs taking part in this collaboration with the museum this summer. She was an Artist in Residence at Pilchuck during Session 3, June 5 – 16, and will be a Visiting Artists at the Museum of Glass on September 9 – 13.  

“I've worked with casting glass a couple of times, but not as closely,” says Anya. “This is the first time I've really been part of, or witnessing, the whole process, so it's really exciting. It's a very seductive material.... I do a lot of bronze casting, so I know how much detail you can pick up in bronze, and then it's been interesting to me, because obviously glass has got a thicker viscosity in terms of how it moves and what it will do.”

Born and raised in Scotland, Anya currently lives between London and San Diego, where she was previously a professor at University of California San Diego. Anya typically works with organic materials in site-specific installations that explore the materials’ mutable qualities and the effects of time, often embracing the natural processes of decay and other transformations.

Last fall, Anya spent a few days with Ben Cobb and Joe Rossano, where the two glass artists helped introduce her to hot glass. The three artists reunited this summer at Pilchuck during Session 3 as Gaffers and Artist in Resident, with the additional help of Artist Assistant Andy Lawrence, to continue Anya’s experimentation in glass.  

In preparation for the residency, Anya brought a carload of materials to Pilchuck. “I brought logs where the inside had totally rotted out. I have a really huge jade hedge... and then I had this huge barrel cactus that got rotted and I dried that out. It's got huge spikes on it.” While on campus, her and Andy also spent time exploring and collecting detritus from the tree farm on which Pilchuck is built, examining recently cut tree rounds and areas of controlled burns.

“We've been making really loose molds, I guess you could call them. Laying big bits of wood in this kind of big metal pot, and then pouring, blowing, the glass inside the wood, pulling it out, and sometimes stretching it.” Anya explains. “We've made these kind of weird, huge shapes, long shapes, blobby shapes, that don't look like logs or wood, but some of them have got really beautiful inclusions where the ash is really burnt in.”  

In addition to the work in the hot shop, Anya was also busy up the hill in the mold room making plaster molds of dried-up apples and other pieces from the jade hedge.  

Reflecting on the experience, Anya says her time at Pilchuck has given her a lot to consider when planning how to use her Museum of Glass residency in the fall. “I’m basically using [this residency] as a kind of setting up in my mind, so I can go there with a clear idea of what's achievable.”

Anya will continue working closely with Ben, who is the museum’s Hot Shop Director, in Tacoma in the fall. She says establishing a working relationship with collaborators is important to her work, which she also observes as critical to the act of blowing glass. “It's been really wonderful watching Joe and Ben and Andy all work together, because they have a rapport. They've worked together before and clearly enjoy working together,” she says. “It feels really seamless with the group as I've got. It’s amazing.”  

Ben, who has been working at the Museum of Glass since it opened in 2002 and has worked at Pilchuck many times in various capacities, says the AiR program is an incubator. The program exposes new artists to a buffet of techniques, processes and possibilities, and encourages them to explore in every studio to see what ideas might be sparked. He says the opportunity for Anya and others to then be a Visiting Artist at the museum allows them to refine their vision and produce work with the assistance of the whole team.  

When asked how glass and this experience might impact her practice, she says she hasn’t quite figured it out yet, but she is interested in the relationship between the molten glass and other materials. “The glass is impacting the material; it's changing the wood. As we’re repeatedly using the [mold], the glass is changing that.”

Stay tuned to see how Anya continues her journey with glass at the Museum of Glass in September. More information can be found here.