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Kiara Pelissier with one of her glass knots
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A pair of the artist’s glass crumples
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Pelissier adjusts one of her Agua vases.
Name: Kiara Pelissier
What she makes: Handblown glass objects
Fun fact: She gave up her training as a gymnast to focus on glass, but says she still uses the skills she learned.
Early inspiration: When Pelissier was 12, she visited the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle, Maine, and looked in on a glass workshop. “I distinctly remember that day and the smell of the burning material,” she recalls. “I said to myself, ‘I’m going to do that one day.’ I collected some scraps of glass and kept them like treasures.” At age 19, she says, “I took my first glass class and didn’t look back.”
Art education: After attending the Cleveland Institute of Art, Pelissier came to Richmond in 2004 to get her MFA at VCU School of the Arts because she wanted to study with glass professor Jack Wax. “I started experimenting and manipulating glass in grad school and worked with several amazing artists where the focus had been about reaching a level of perfection,” she says. “I wanted to find my own voice. I needed to say something, but I wasn’t sure what. I began to play with the boundaries of glass as a material.”
Recent work: Pelissier’s work continues to explore boundaries. Her “crumples” are made by blowing hot glass right up to the point where most artists stop, but she allows the watery blue objects to further transform. “I blow it up to be thin and hot, then I yank it out and have a few seconds to work with the material before it becomes rigid,” she explains. The hot glass folds in on itself creating different densities of color and unique shapes. She’s also making “splash anemones,” which she says are “a celebration of coral polyps that are starting to disappear due to unhealthy environmental conditions.” Also, on her studio shelves are blue and green glass knots formed with a textured brass mold, then pulled, stretched and twisted into coils.
Where she works: She blows her glass at The Glass Spot and works out of a space in the Fan District along with her parents who have their own studios. “I come from four generations of artists,” she says. “My father is a metalworker, my mother works with textiles, my grandmother and great-grandmother were sculptors.”
Where you can find her work: Alma’s RVA; the Visual Arts Center of Richmond’s Craft + Design show (Nov. 22-24); the Quirk Hotel lobby in December; her studio by appointment; and on her website.
