Pezzulich, a glass artist who lives and works in Springfield, will be presenting her work at the Sugarloaf Crafts Festival in Chantilly from Friday through Sunday. What kind of glass do you work with?
I work with fused glass as opposed to blown glass, so everything is melted in a kiln. I use a specialty type of glass that comes in a lot of different colors, some clear, some opaque. There are sheets; there are rods of the glass; there is crusted glass. I use all of theses different forms of glass to created functional and decorative art glass.
How did you get into glass?
I’ve been working with glass for a long time, maybe 30 years. At first I did stained glass, then I did mosaics. And then I did a very short period of doing glass beads with a torch. And because of that I had to have a kiln, and once I got the kiln I knew I could fuse glass, so I started doing that.
What do you learn from craft shows?
I find what other people do [to be] endlessly interesting because so many people have such imaginations. That’s another thing about glass is that everybody can be really good but really different.
Do you have a favorite historical period for glasswork?
In the last 30 years, they have made glass fusing possible for people to do at home. The chemistry of the glass is such that if you use different kinds of glass you can’t really fuse them together. One may cool down faster than another type, so everything breaks. It wasn’t until about the 1960s that a company started creating glass of all kinds of colors that you could fuse together without everything breaking. This has launched a kind of renaissance of glass fusing. Things you’ve seen in the last 40 years are things you couldn’t have done before.
— Liz Essley
