Artist Bio
I am an artist with a degree in both photography and glassblowing from Tidewater Community College in Virginia. I discovered glassblowing while finishing up my photography degree and instantly fell in love with the medium. I am passionate about art in general, but while photography is my first love, glass is my special passion. In glassblowing I find I love creating sculptures to tell a story and in a similar way I find that my photographs tell stories and invoke emotions.
I wanted to find a way to combine the two mediums in a new way, so I created my own distortion lenses (called “Seeing Stones”) in the glass hotshop and then took them to the photo studio and placed them in front of the camera lens to create some unique photos. It took 2 years of experimentation to find the perfect ways to distort the glass in the hotshop and to test each one of my Seeing Stones out in the photo studio. By the time I was ready to get started, the pandemic shutdown came along. It’s been a long wait to get back into the studio and in the meantime I have turned to other forms of art, such as printmaking and sculpture building to pass the time while I wait.
During the pandemic shutdown, while I waited to go back into a hotshop or a photo studio, I felt like an artistic nomad, wandering from medium to medium. My social media pages were full of progress videos in the artistic adventures I took. I created the art name Blatant Nomad for social media because of this. It means “An unashamed wanderer” and it is very much how I feel moving from one art medium to the next.
