Friends of OURS

Emily Mcbride

Emily McBride has been a friend of ours for a few years, but have recently been working closer together at FOCI, MN Center for Glass Arts.  Emily has a long background in education after gaining experience working in renowned glass schools across the United States.  Since her time as an undergraduate student her work has focused on the beauty in the mundane, and the meditation that comes with creation. 

Her work is always familiar, but with a surprise… sometimes in color, sometimes form, other times pattern and texture.  There is a playfulness that is examining the seriousness of our surroundings and watching for a convincing surprise in disguise.  Emily herself is very dedicated, her CV speaks to her professionalism and desire to participate in the current creative conversation, and she has and continues to play a part in shaping the education of Minnesota based glass art.  

OUR Glass is happy to feature Emily as our first Friend of OURS and we are ecstatic to have been able to work with Emily on creating one of her branches in our Rosa, Laranja, and our newest color Honey. You can find more of her branches on her Instagram or her website and shop listed below!

We want to thank Emily one more time for being the start of the Friends of OURS series! As soon as we saw the first one of these branches we were mesmerized by the way the color illuminated through the glass. Networking the glass like this is a multi step process that includes making your initial parts, the individual segments of glass rods, and then assembling them after they have been cut to size. Creating these parts is not necessarily easy, but it’s much more predictable than the assemblage. Putting the segments together is a delicate process, the glass going back and forth between being so liquid that it’s uncontrollable, and so cold that it can spontaneously crack and fall apart from the wind. As she has learned to make these, the process has required less and less conversation, as the real difficulty in the pieces are not in the moments of assemblage, but the in between moments of maintenance when it is in it’s most fragile states.

-Tynan Pratumwon

Website: Emily McBride Glass

Instagram: @emilymcbride.glass