Thursday, 28 January

Anna Mlasowsky will discuss how the place we are born into informs our values, behaviors and beliefs. She will focus on her use of the medium of glass as an agent to question morality and normative assumptions, while utilizing performance to connect object and utility to generate meaning. In her work, Mlasowsky is interested in how to use the material’s properties as a mediator to examine ideas of personal identity (cultural, political, sexual), to explore dis-belonging, otherness, queerness and disobedience.
Born in East Germany, Anna Mlasowsky holds a BA in Glass from the Royal Danish Academy and an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Washington. In 2018 she received the Aldo Bellini Award, the John and Joyce Price Award of Excellence and was a Museum of Art and Design Burk Prize finalist. She was the Windgate Visiting Artist at Purchase College in 2019 and will be a Beckman Fellow at the Science History Institute in 2021. Anna has been included in Museum collections such as The Corning Museum of Glass, The Toyama City Museum and the Castello Sforzesco.

BOOM! are a female separatist group for artists working with glass. They strive to make glass working more accessible, to break old norms and traditions associated with the craft and create a platform and meeting place for women on the glass scene.
Traditionally glassworks have been a male-dominated environment, characterized by machoism and competing on whoever can blow the biggest, heaviest, most technically advanced glass objects. In this talk, two members of BOOM – Nina Westman and Sara Lundkvist – discuss how they use glass to open new ways of using the material, exploring how to find new ways of working together and to organize, support each other and to cooperate on ideas, rather than compete against each other.

Kristin Larsson is a crafter with glass as her main material. She started working in a glass studio as a fifteen-year-old and later took a vocational degree from Kosta glass school. She has worked as a glassblower in different studios in Denmark, USA and Austria. Kristin has a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in fine art from the ceramics and glass programmes at Konstfack in Stockholm. Kristin lives in Norrköping, Sweden and works from her studio in Gustavsberg outside of Stockholm.
A reoccurring method in her practice is to combine glass with different metals like copper, pewter and bronze. Her work is usually playful and experimental and she explores the properties of the materials in the hunt for new expressions; the craft traditions, which she finds are hierarchic and limiting, are challenged.
Kristin often uses a historic perspective to understand the contemporary world she lives in. She is interested in, and inspired by, archaeological and natural historical findings that make us reflect upon our short existence on Earth and the traces we leave behind, and how those traces will be understood by later generations. Her sculptures play on the verge between the natural and the cultural.

Looking at, looking into, and looking through glass is a honed skill when one is preoccupied with transparency, reflection and mutability. Jocelyne Prince will share some of her recent works and ongoing research which embrace multi-scopic ways of observing glass. A focus on windows, screens and thresholds alongside Nordic painters, forensic studies, libraries and Versailles will guide a poetic take on the relationship between material properties, the ubiquity of glass within our built environment and the potential metaphors that unfold.
Jocelyne Prince is an artist working with the material and conceptual properties of glass. Her process explores how actions can be recorded through material. Transparency, optical phenomena and projection are key tools that translate these poetic acts into performative events, or objects that highlight ephemeral occurrences. Prince earned a B.F.A. from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an M.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design. She exhibits her work in museums and alternative venues across North America, Asia and Europe. Recent residencies include: S12 (Bergen); K-Arts (Seoul); Gent Glass; ACAD (Calgary); Urban Glass (Brooklyn); The Studio (Corning); Tacoma Museum of Glass, Wheaton Arts (Millville, NJ). She was awarded the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, a yearlong grant supporting the development of her studio work. Prince is a long-time faculty member of the Glass Department at the Rhode Island School of Design. She has been honoured with RISD's Frazier Award for Excellence in Teaching. She lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.