Lilac Glass is run by Lindsey Adelman and Em McDonald.
We combine our aesthetic qualities and technical skills
to create glass in a variety of forms.
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Lindsey Adelman
Lindsey Claire Adelman is an emerging glass and photo artist from Barrie, Ontario.
After attending Haliburton School of Art and Design, she continued on to Sheridan College, where she completed a Bachelor of Craft & Design in Glass in 2019. During her education she had a Summer Residency at the glass studio at Harbourfront Centre as well as began assisting the contestants on the Netflix show “Blown Away”. In 2020, Lindsey became a resident artist in Living Art Centre’s glass studio where she continues to expand her practice.
Lindsey's glass work expresses feelings of whimsy and playfulness, all while encompassing and celebrating queer joy. Through a combination of glassblowing and hot sculpting, she creates objects that harness colour, light, and shadow, touching upon the ethereal qualities of glass- its presence and absence; inviting beauty and boldness into everyday spaces. Most recently, she has been creating pieces with layers of opaque colours as a queer and maximalist rebellion against minimalist aesthetics. The vibrant patterns within this new series capture the movement of hot glass, resulting in objects that are both decorative and functional.
Em McDonald
Em McDonald is an emerging glass artist from Georgetown, Ontario. They moved to Toronto and received a Bachelor Degree from York University in Philosophy, where they focused on art and aesthetics. They chose to continue exploring these ideas as a maker and so pursued another degree in the Craft and Design program at Sheridan College focusing on glass sculpture. Em is now a Resident Artist at the Living Arts Centre where they continue to further their artistic practice and teach.
The experience of living in the world is at once a unique and universal one. My work seeks to explore this, visualizing the mind and body connection through glass. Using the technique of sand casting, I create large rings and circles that contrast one heavily textured face with two polished surfaces. This duality represents the mind and body. The textures of my pieces reference metal, stone, and ceramics - earthly elements that symbolize the body. The depth of glass makes the polished surfaces distort these textures, visualizing the mind and body interacting with each other. The optical clarity of my work creates an ethereal sense of thought and feeling, fleeting emotions that have no physicality.