I have always been inspired by nature whether I’m on a river or near the vastness of the ocean waters. I’m not imitating nature but trying to pause a moment, a millisecond of thought and go deeply into the image through specific strategies using glass!  My musings take on a sense of soul washings, clearing and cleansing.  I allow a kind of sound in my mind to emanate from the work.  

Water is becoming a delicate fast depleting resource.  

I want my work to literally shine a light on water. Water contains the potential of giving of life with many layers of meaning impacting our lives.  

More recently I spent a short time in the boundary waters in Minnesota. I passed through a number of very lush water lily areas. I note here that there is a 70% decline in birds. I have this feeling that as I live there is a steep decline of natural resources, water being one. I am painfully aware of this decline in the richness of water that was/is thoroughly healthy, lush, vibrant.  

I think there is a collision in my work between beauty, earth’s resources and politics. The new work titled “Ми українці” (translation: We Are Ukrainian) for example calls into question our relationship to humanity, to each other. There is certainly a clash of beauty and humanness. Who are we in these crushing moments where one nation is transgressing another. Who are we when we can’t live in peace.  

I saw those water lilies in my mind’s eye as bright yellow with a deep blue center which happens to be the national colors of Ukraine. Then I understood the dream. I’m thinking of the commonness or the connectedness of people throughout the world. That is exactly what Ron and I followed in our path to create the glass center. Even on this small scale of a glass center in a community, we made a difference in the lives of people who came to us. Of course, it made a beautiful difference in our own lives as well.  

I believe all my work reminds us of that beauty which is fast dissolving. Glass in its purity can speak to the heart of the matter and essentially for me it is a fine intoxication.  

—Kathleen Mulcahy

You can’t talk about Ron without talking about Kathleen or vice versa. The two were an unbeatable team for almost 40 years. Talented artists, they co-founded the Pittsburgh Glass Center, accomplishing what no one believed possible, a thriving arts center. Appropriately they were honored together as Artists of the Year in PA in 2013–14. Yet as much as they worked and lived together, sharing a creative vision, they were individuals pursuing their own paths.

In their own ways, each changed how we think about glass by bringing together disparate components: art and glass, fire and ice, ephemeral and concrete, tangible and liminal, the ordinary and the beautiful. Each of their individual pieces fuse the usually separate spheres of art and glassmaking, an act of liberation in a world where the very specificity of definitions creates separation instead. As the poet Rilke wrote: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure, and while we stand in wonder, it serenely disdains to destroy us. Every Angel is terrible.”

Ron Desmett’s work exudes power in sculptural forms that challenge us with their physical presence. His unexpectedly large, frequently solid black vessels stand out in the art world. He seems to deny the very qualities of glass that make it magical, though some might argue that his darkness accesses a black magic or alchemy infused with an inescapable beauty.  As Rauschenberg said about his black or white paintings, they “are either too full or too empty to be thought—thereby they remain visual experiences,” challenging as physical objects while somehow emanating an air of mystery. His bodies are obstinate, refusing to budge while unlocking unexpected flights of fancy.

Kathleen Mulcahy’s work is seductive as an inventive mastery of various glass-making techniques. This is intrinsic to her sophisticated conceptual grounding that encompasses references to the body and its breath, the fluidity and magic of nature and water, the relationship between presence and absence, and an illumination that can be spiritual and/or physical. Put together in her innate creative practice, these qualities are embedded in objects that elicit a sense of wonder and unlock ineffable and indefinable associations and states of being. Simultaneously they can be grounded in the everyday world as seen in her newest magical mapping of the reality of Ukraine.

The work of both artists has grown by challenging traditional techniques and the meaning of glass just as their work to create an internationally recognized glass studio and exhibition space in Pittsburgh was a dauting challenge. Succeeding at both has been a miraculous accomplishment for the talented couple. As artist Tanya Aguiñiga reminds us, “art can offer different ways of getting to an answer. It can offer different possibilities, generative space, and power over your own identity” or as Edgar Degas said “art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”

—Vicky A Clark