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Beth's adventure with molten glass started over 11 years ago in a high school art class in Pittsburgh, PA. Her teacher, as part of a grant to introduce his students to new mediums, purchased some basic glass beadmaking equipment. Beth quickly found herself hooked on this fascinating medium, and was soon eating lunch in the art room in order to spend more time at the torch. With the help of her grandfather, a retired welder, she set up her first studio at the age of 18 and has been working in glass ever since.
Beth is a self-taught glass artist and owes much of her skills to hours of trial-and-error at the torch. Her jewelry design and metalsmithing abilities were developed through courses at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, MA while a student at Tufts University, from which she graduated in 2003 with a BA in American Studies. In 2007, Beth was awarded a scholarship from the Penland School of Crafts to attend Flamework/Metalwork, a course on working with glass and metal taught by Emilio Santini and C. James Meyer.
Beth's work continues to grow as she experiments with new techniques to incorporate flameworked glass and silver into bold designs. As a visual, hands-on designer, her version of a sketchbook is the many containers of beads, color studies, wire squiggles and half-finished jewelry designs that surround her workbench. Beth creates every piece from start to finish by hand, without the use of molds or castings. Each glass element is made one at a time by melting rods of glass with a torch. Sterling silver wire and tubing is shaped, hammered, and melted to create unique settings for the glass.
Beth creates her work at a studio in the Joy Street Studios building in Somerville, MA, a wonderful community of artists in a former storage warehouse. She is an instructor at Diablo Glass and Metal, a school offering courses in flameworking, glass blowing, and fused and stained glass in Boston, MA, and is a member of the International Society of Glass Beadmakers.
For a list of Beth's past accomplishments, please click here.
For insight into Beth's creative process and images of works in progress, visit her studio journal at bethjewelry.blogspot.com
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My workbench. My trusty torch is in the foreground, it runs on oxygen and propane and has made thousands of beads. The kiln is used to cool the finished beads slowly so they don't crack, which is also called annealing. My other tools include safety glasses, a large pair of tweezers, a tungsten pick, a knife, and a pair of altered BBQ tongs used to flatten and shape the glass. |
