This summer our 104 workshops, taught by 118 artist-instructors, will span the world of craft. You will be able to make paper using tree bark for site-specific installations, learn the complex structures of pop-up books, create your own designs for decals to transfer onto ceramics, or investigate light and shadow in glass. Perhaps learning to forge copper and brass or making your own cutlery or linking digital photographic techniques with traditional hands-on processes will pique your interest. Our sixteen well-equipped studios await your ideas, questions, and creativity.
—Jean W. McLaughlin, Penland director
Complete workshop listings for summer 2016 are now online! Browse workshops by session or by studio to see full course descriptions, dates, instructor bios, links to instructor websites, images, and more. Registration is currently open for all summer workshops, and scholarship applications will be available January 1.
Here’s to filling 2016 with creative exploration. See you this summer!
We are working right now to update the website with complete summer information. Meanwhile, we have just posted a PDF of the summer catalog, which features some of our favorite blacksmiths on the cover. Left to right: studio coordinator Daniel Beck, instructor Andrew Dohner, studio assistant Eric Smith. In the background is student Don Walker.
In the 200 years since the first electric light was invented, the light bulb has become a common household object. It has also come to symbolize new ideas and innovation, a spark of creativity, a sudden leap of understanding. Taken separately, a light bulb’s component parts are a simple glass globe, a wire filament, and an electrical current, but together, they open up whole new possibilities. Glass lends light form and volume, while light brings glass assertively to life.
This spring, the Penland glass studio will be all about exploring the possibilities and ideas that open when glass and light combine. It’s an area that collaborating artists Jen Elek and Jeremy Bart are already quite familiar with. In their recent exhibition Look! See? at The Museum of Glass in Tacoma, WA, the two created a dynamic and interactive landscape of forms, colors, reflections, and luminescence. Just as with a single light bulb, their pairing of glass and light combines to make more than the sum of its parts.
For students interested in ways to take glass sculpture a step further, Jen and Jeremy’s spring concentration Hot Glass & Electric Light will be the ideal opportunity to do just that. During the eight-week workshop, which runs March 13-May 6, Jen will lead students through a strong base of hot glass techniques—and Jeremy will added instruction in the fundamentals of incorporating various forms of light into glass, from neon to LEDs.
Register for Hot Glass & Electric Light to give your work a literal jolt of electricity, and discover the potential for striking, communicative, and even humorous sculpture that the combination offers. Unlike the white creature below, we don’t think you’ll be disappointed.
Hot Glass & Electric Light
Jeremy Bert & Jen Elek — Most of us live within the glow of electric light—often protected or filtered by glass. This class will empower the nontechnically inclined artist to harness these omnipresent media by exploring the mechanics of glass and light while considering the potential for electric light in sculpture. Jen will teach the fundamentals of glass furnace work for the full eight weeks. Jeremy will join us for four weeks to cover the basic principles, vocabulary, and techniques of neon and other forms of electric light, including LED and incandescent. Artists ready to explore the combination of glass forming and electric light will find this workshop a great fit. All levels. Code S00GA
Jen has been a member of glass artist Lino Tagliapietra’s team since 2002; Jeremy is a certified welder, crane operator, and sign electrician. The two have previously taught at Pilchuck (WA) and have exhibited their work at Museum of Glass (WA) and Pittsburgh Glass Center.