Tandem Glass
Dresden, Maine
Terrill Waldman:
I’m primarily inspired by botany and color, taking many photos on walks and in botanical gardens. I mimic nature with my glass work by amplifying or simplifying patterns and forms. I spend my winters in Maine blowing glass and designing around what will come up in the spring. In winter I work from memory. In summer, when the world is full of color we shut the glass blowing studio down and I turn to my clear work: cutting, etching and polishing glass on my lathe.
These days I think about my art form more and more as just color. I rely on my familiarity with glass to play with just that. My favorite thing to do is pull canne (long strands of glass pulled into rods and threads). I layer the colors to hold the light in a way people haven’t seen before. Lately, I’ve been geeking out on transforming off-colors like pea green to make them rich and filled with light.
Charlie Jenkins:
My artistry is a by-product of my fascination with clean forms and brilliant colors. The challenge is to keep it fresh and relevant while keeping it interesting to me. My craft has never evoked any message other than beauty for the sake of beauty. Glass is inherently beautiful.
The Mosaic line is the foundation of our Tandem collection. Terrill and I created it in 2005 when we needed to make holiday gifts for the family and everybody was asking for a piece of glass. Our production studio had a natural by-product of scrap glass colors, interesting threads, shards, and randomly twisted stringers that became the decoration for drinkware that we gave away to our families and friends. To me, the Mosaic design represents the individual. The one. That one cup, which we now make thousands of, is an individual art piece that almost anyone can afford to take home and keep in their own way. Why do we need sameness?
