NANCY CALLAN
Nancy Callan borrows her wondrous designs from nature: a spider's web, the vein of a leaf, the texture of ice... Observing these delicate fragments connects her deeply to elemental life forces. Callan sees herself as a collector of visual data, which she transcribes into the particular language of glass. Each detail can become an avenue of exploration in its own right, and the finished work is often far beyond its original source of inspiration.
Trained in Venetian glass traditions, Callan develops her own language from the vocabulary formed by historical glass processes such as cane, incalmo and murrine.
Callan studied at the Massachusetts College of Art in the Northwest. She was also a key member of Maestro Lino Tagliapietra's glassblowing team for 19 years.
She has received numerous awards, including the Creative Glass Center of America Fellowship, and has held residencies at such prestigious venues as the Museum of Glass (Tacoma, WA), the Toledo Museum of Art (Toledo, OH), the Pittsburgh Glass Center (Pittsburgh, PA) and the Chrysler Museum (Norfolk, VA). She has conducted advanced glassblowing workshops at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, WA, Pittsburgh Glass Center, Haystack Mountain School in Deer Isle, ME and Penland School of Crafts in Ashville, NC.
MEL DOUGLAS
Throughout his career, Mel Douglas has pursued work that has been hailed as "quiet, yet strangely energetic and animated" and as evidence of "his commitment to creative experimentation and evolution with the ever-challenging medium of glass."
Robert Cook, AGWA Curator of 20th Century Art,
Art Gallery of Western Australia
Douglas' work, with its minimalist aesthetic, probes the creative possibilities of volume and line, where form is not a medium for drawing, but a three-dimensional drawing itself.
Using the unique qualities of glass and its rich marking potential, Douglas uses line as a means to inform, define and enable three-dimensional space.
Mel Douglas has been working as an independent artist since 2000. In 2020 she was awarded a PhD from the Australian National University for her practical research into how glass can be understood through the aesthetics of drawing. Douglas has won numerous awards including the Tom Malone Prize in 2020 and 2014, the Ranamok Glass Prize in 2002, and the Ebeltolft International Young Glass Award in 2007. In 2021 she was selected as an Art Group Creative Fellow at the Canberra Glassworks. In 2019, the NGA's Robert and Eugenie Bell Decorative Arts and Design Fund selected one of Douglas' pieces as the first acquisition for its collection.
