Liliana Cirstea Glenn

Artist’s Statement

Growing up in the city, I was a good and active student in school, played numerous musical instruments, danced, and sang in a choir.  In summers I spent time singing folk songs and weaving carpets, knitting and crocheting, doing garden work, alongside my grandmother.  While everybody in the city predicted that I would go into politics in my home country (Moldavia in Eastern Europe), my grandmother quietly nurtured my artistic passions. She once told me how my hands and creativity would take me a long way.

 

Since then, I have traveled different parts of world, achieved numerous degrees in humanities, and all along continued to work with my hands.  My attraction to creating glass art flourished when I studied lampwork handmade glass beads with Caitlin Hyde (now at Corning NY) in Carbondale, IL.  I spent the next year refining my technique. Currently I have my own studio in my New England home.

 

Making glass beads is like choreography to me.  I plan and use my skills to conceptualize a bead, and in turn the glass, its colors, and the heat – just like dancers – build on my vision with their own naturally conditioned interpretations.  I like that I am not 100% in control: the glass surprises me sometimes in ways that influence my thinking and make me a better artist – an artist who speaks the language of the glass but never speaks for the glass.  In my first show of lampworked glass beads I featured a new concept I called “life drops”.  Here is an excerpt from what I told my audience about them:

 

“…to make this (a round bead) into a life drop, once the design is complete, I hold the bead in the flame steadily until gravity begins to pull the melted glass downward.  The design, previously fixed now assumes a new life: a life drop…No matter how pre-designed the life drops (no matter how pre-planned life), in letting them be led by gravity, I cannot predict exactly the pattern the beads will take.  This emergence of a new identity for the bead parallels my desire to celebrate the fluidity and emergence of life.”