Carrie Gustafson

"My joyful aesthetic is the result of a quest for lightness and luminosity in colorful, bold, modernist glass."

While a printmaking major at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Carrie Gustafson began experimenting in glassblowing, thereby igniting her signature style of creating intricate patterns on vibrantly colored, hand-blown glass.

For each piece of glass, Gustafson first selects the colors and lays these onto the blow pipe. When the piece is the size of a cup, she encases it in a bubble of clear glass, before blowing the vessel to its finished shape. After the piece cools, Gustafson applies an intricate web of hand-cut stencils onto the glass, and then hand sandblasts the surface, a process that cuts through the opaque outer shell to the translucent under-layer of colored glass. Gustafson considers this last step a subtle metaphor for her own personal search for lightness and tranquility, beauty and joy.

After earning a BFA at RISD in Printmaking, Gustafson studied glass at the Pilchuck Glass School (WA), Penland School of Crafts (NC), The Studio at The Corning Museum of Glass (NY), and at Rosin Studio, on Murano, Venice's historic "glass island". Recently, Gustafson introduced a line of items in clear glass.