A feeling for glass
- Anna’s practice reflects an interest in spiritual objects and iconography from diverse cultures
- She won the International Perfume Bottle Association’s competition in 2021
- She has held leadership roles with the Glass Art Society and National Liberty Museum
Anna Boothe creates eye-catching avant-garde pieces of kiln cast glass in her studio, a converted 1860s barn in rural Pennsylvania. She began exploring glass at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1980s and advanced it with an MFA at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art. Anna primarily uses the pâte de verre technique in her work, a late 19th-century French technique using lead crystal that, she says, “confers a translucency that holds light rather than reflecting it, letting me convey symbolic icons with nuance.” A former pastry chef, she likens carving wax to shaping chocolate and layering glass powders to icing. Pieces leave the kiln firing process with surfaces as finely crafted as pâtisserie. “Glass can be arrestingly beautiful, but the discipline is long, full of failure and surprise and still humbles me,” she says.
Interview
- How did body parts become such a central theme in your practice?
- The anatomical symbols in my pieces draw on spiritual objects from world cultures. This fascination was instilled in me by my father’s interest in ancient Egypt and deepened when I encountered temples, reliquaries and sacred objects on my own travels. Though I do not practice a religion, I often feel a visceral connection to what they express and to the objects made in their honour.
- What meaning do they carry in your work?
- Anatomical forms are familiar in all cultures and act as threads that link us, creating subtle pathways to acceptance between disparate peoples. Hand iconography, for instance, is found everywhere in sacred and daily objects across cultures. They signify connection and unity.
- How do your daily rituals like gardening or yoga influence your art?
- Gardening, yoga and baking are activities I lose myself in. Each of them, especially yoga, demands deep focus. These practices sharpen my concentration in the studio and help me enter that liminal space between reality and a dream state from which my art comes.
- Where can your pieces be seen?
- My pieces are in the collections of the Corning Museum of Glass, the Museum of American Glass, Racine Art Museum, Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass and Tacoma Museum of Art.
Anna Boothe is a master artisan: she began her career in 1980 and she started teaching in 1988
Where
Anna Boothe
