Glass that blooms with life
- Amber creates grotto-like vignettes and dioramas with a sense of movement and vitality
- Raw materials for her mixed media artworks include cast-off glass from factories and antique pieces
- Her art has been exhibited widely, in locations including Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts
Amber Cowan’s single colour mixed media artworks seem to freeze glass in a single, vivid moment. “I want it to look like it is alive in some way. I like making people think about glass as a liquid,” she says. In Amber’s dioramas and composed pieces, bubbles, blooms and tendrils mix with vintage pressed-glass bowls and figurines in a collage of ideas. Her raw material is cullet, a processed form of glass waste that she salvages from old pressed-glass factories and sorts by colour. "Flame working and glassblowing are central to my process," she explains. Different coloured glass will not melt together without breaking apart so Amber works with that limitation, creating single colour schemes in her pieces.
Discover her work
INTERVIEW
I have had a life long fascination with the material. Glass is endlessly challenging. Even if you master the material, it has a mind of its own. You will break things and have failures. I am still learning from my material and can never really control it.
I do not generally break pieces that are intact. Sometimes I cut pieces apart. It is almost like collage. I will use the foot of one dish, the top of another dish to frankenstein things together. The organic leaves and flowers you see are sculpted by hand.
In graduate school I found a barrel of broken Easter candy dishes in a fleshy pink colour. I was able to melt them down to reuse. I have been stashing away thousands of pounds of similar pieces for ten years. They are not making any more of it.
I have some recurring characters. I use swans a lot. I see them as a symbol of love. The snail is a symbol of freedom, to me. My practice has an undeniable feminine quality to it, and I am okay with that. Glass has been historically a male-dominated craft.
