After Mastering Glass Sculpture, Rye Brook Artist Looks to Share Techniques

As a former cast member of the Broadway show, Hair, glass artist Martha Taylor was bitten by the creative bug long ago.

But that was 1977 in New York City, and for the last 15 years this Rye Brook artist has traded self expression through song and dance for working with her hands as a glass artist.

Since then she has mastered just about every glassmaking technique imaginable—from wood firing to casting to cold construction—after taking an introductory Brooklyn class on a whim more than ten years ago.

“I really love all of it, and I think there’s a really great potential to put it all together,” she said of her different techniques.

That wish to meld together those practices may take some time, but it seems she has begun to do just that by dipping her hands into different styles. Plus, she was trained by the best: Metropolitan Museum of Art talent, Paul Stankard, has been a mentor for many years, having helped design her home studio many years ago.

She also thanks week-long bouts of work-time isolation at Corning Museum of Glass and early learning at Brooklyn’s Urban Glass for her training in what has helped her to be, in her words, “obsessed” with glassmaking.

Piles off finished dishes, candleholders and other decorative pieces now show that dedication around her home studio.

The next step in her artistic journey? Teaching others how to do the same.

This summer, Taylor will be teaching a series of instructional group workshops at Katonah Art Center. And rather than teach jewelry-making like many others in the field, she will demonstrate how to create the off-kilter bowls and square plates she counts part of her reportoire.

The executive director of the facility, Loren Anderson, believes those uncommon results are exactly what will inspire other community members to become interested in using a material that is part of our everyday lives.

“Her work is really unusual. We’ve had a lot of fused glass workshops to make things like necklaces, but [Martha Taylor] is a whole new level of artist for us and her colors are phenomenal,” she said.

For Taylor, it’s those tinted reflections that foster her love for the craft.

“Light is something we can’t see but you have no real understanding of, but without it we wouldn’t see anything that we see— it illuminates our world but it’s invisible to us," she added.

Taylor's mission is to capture that anomoly of the natural world by creating objects that utilize the world's light in coordinance with the material's ability to reflect.

A cold construction piece made last year exemplified this eternal wonder.

Created through a process of cutting and grinding, Taylor used only a small bit of yellow dye to make the work, but the end result created a sheen that augmented light shining through.

It's also impressive that Martha Taylor’s reputation already precedes her through a local following, even though she has barely put any of her pieces up for sale yet.

Pottery instructor at the Katonah Art Center, Alek Ustin, has strayed from his ceramic comfort zone after having been impressed by with her production scope.

“Every piece of hers replicates a totally different style, and you could see each being done by a different artist,” he said.