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.
Lindsey Adelman
My work seeks to evoke a sense of nostalgia for the natural world. I am inspired by my love for landscape photography and curiosity for natural beauty. Glass and photography have an inherent symbiotic relationship. Through my practice, I continually seek to explore this marriage by creating decorative glass objects. I am aesthetically influenced by historical photographic processes. I have two main bodies of work, photo-resist sandblasted plates and fossil-vitrea vessels and castings.
I explore natural landscapes and photograph their beauty to preserve them. I transform this imagery into surface decoration applied to blown-glass plates. The translucency of the material adds an ethereal quality to the image. Through this process, I document the stillness and fleeting beauty of our natural world.
Through a process called fossil vitrea, I use glass as a medium to photographically document natural elements. I fuse found leaves, feathers, and flowers onto sheets of glass. Through the fusing process, the organic object is burned away and it’s ghostly image remains imprinted on the glass. The fused sheets are then “rolled-up” in the hotshop and transformed into vessels, or used with a combination of sandcasting to return the pieces to nature. My glass brings attention to and a sense of longing for the intrinsic beauty of our environment.
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.