Pilchuck Glass School Announces
Beginning of Its 2004
Emerging Artist-in-Residence Program

Seattle, WA - Pilchuck Glass School is pleased to announce the beginning of its fifteenth annual Emerging Artist-in-Residence Program. Six residents, selected from a highly competitive applicant pool, will live and work on Pilchuck’s campus from September 20 through November 12, 2004. The 2004 Emerging Artists in Residence (EAiRs) are Kristina Arnold, Jessyca Burke, Lenka Novakova, Elizabeth Perkins, Mielle Riggie and Laura Ward.

Recent University of Tennessee M.F.A. recipient Kristina Arnold has three years’ experience working with blown, slumped and vacuum-formed Plexiglas creating works based on imagery from human biology that delve into the relationship between body and space. She plans to use the residency to explore mechanical combinations of light sources with cast- or slumped-glass forms that probe the concept of bounded space.

Jessyca Burke, a resident of Eugene, Oregon, and a Pilchuck student in 2000 and 2001, has an extensive background in bronze casting and printmaking. A 2003 M.F.A. graduate of Alfred University, her current work investigates the relationship between humans and nature, “how individuals as a part of cultural groups create and measure their place within an uncontrollable environment.” Burke will experiment with glass as a dominant part of mixed-media sculpture during her residency.

A native of the Czech Republic and current resident of Alpharetta, Georgia, Lenka Novakova plans to use this residency to incorporate glass into her future work. Graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Novakova has worked with wood, steel, stone, fabric and concrete. More recently her interests have turned to using light and video projections. Novakova plans to use her residency to explore the use of cast or flat glass to investigate the properties of depth and intensity through three-dimensional displays.

Virginia native Elizabeth Perkins received her M.F.A. from the Virginia Commonwealth University just this year. The product of many generations of farming families, she will use her residency to capture the recollection and reinterpretation of family farm memories. Perkins explains, “In my work the material and the subject matter preserve and show the deterioration of what is being forgotten and what has been worked so hard for.”

Seattle artist Mielle Riggie has been hard at work since receiving her B.F.A from Alfred University in 1997. A Pilchuck teaching assistant in 1999 and a member of the school’s summer staff in 2001, Riggie will return to Pilchuck’s campus to revisit In-side, an earlier performance work featuring a cube made from five large, clear storm windows in which she sat carrying out various tasks. Her work will examine the physicality of emotion. She will bring cubes to manipulate by slumping and painting on in order to examine different environments.

Laura Ward received her M.F.A. in sculpture from the University of Illinois earlier this year. Her most recent body of work uses abandoned houses and empty lots to investigate the differences between house and home. Ward explains the process and the result, “I have re-inhabited abandoned spaces, altered their exteriors, photographed them, then re-abandoned the sites only to watch them be destroyed and become mere memories of lives past.” The work she plans for her residency will be a variation of this. She will create abandoned doll houses out of crystal and paint on them with fired-on enamels or glass frit to fashion objects that “preserve and honor the architecture of childhood innocence.”

Seattle-based artist Tim O’Niell will be the program technician. O’Niell has been at Pilchuck as teaching assistant, artist assistant, and hot-casting shop coordinator and knows the school’s studio capabilities quite well.

Founded in 1990, Pilchuck’s fall Emerging Artist-in-Residence Program offers a group of six artists in the early stages of their careers financial support, a period of time, and a creative environment in which to develop bodies of work focusing on glass. Bridging the academic world and the professional world, the residency differs from the summer educational program in that it does not include instruction or access to the hot shop. EAiRs have full access to Pilchuck’s fusing, slumping and pâté de verre kilns, flameworking torches, and coldworking equipment along with studio space, living accommodations, technical assistance, a $1,000 stipend, and a significant period of time in which to take risks, pursue special projects, or finish a body of work.

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