Feature Artist: Dahlia Bushwick

By Gina Malone

Dahlia Bushwick was all set to be a painter when she happened upon a glass studio in Baltimore where she was studying at the Maryland Institute College of Art. “I was mesmerized by glowing material that seems to magically move from liquid to solid to liquid again,” she says. “I jumped at the opportunity to become an intern at that studio and quickly fell in love with the material.” She liked the limited working time that turning glass into art requires and, too, what the process required of her. “I loved the physical nature of glassblowing: using my entire body during the act rather than sitting in front of an easel for hours.”

Dahlia was born and raised in York, Pennsylvania, the youngest of three girls who wrote, painted and played music. “While both sisters eventually followed more conventional career paths, I found that nothing else fulfilled me in the same way as making art,” she says, “so I followed a different, sometimes scarier, path. My grandfather was also passionate about his hobby of hand building clay sculptures, which I admired and coveted.”

After graduation, Dahlia traveled around the country, gaining experience at studios in Maryland, Virginia, Oregon and Ohio before landing in Asheville. “During this time, I was mentored by various artists at the different glass shops, and I wouldn’t be the glass artist I am today without them,” she says. “In lieu of going to school to learn my practice with only one or two professors, I was fortunate to learn from all different types of glass artists using many different techniques. These artists had a major influence on my life, because they showed me a variety of paths forward to having a working career as a glass artist.”

Like any other art, glassblowing takes a long time to master. “In the last several years, my hands have caught up to my brain so that I can execute my vision of work,” Dahlia says. “My confidence has grown so that I can experiment with various different glass applications and bring my vision to life.”

In 2020, she built her first mold out of mild steel. “I created a line of drinking glasses that emphasized texture and utility,” she says. “Over time, this line evolved as I strived for uniformity in shape and thickness, while giving the customer a range of assorted colors from which to create sets. I then expanded to create vases and lights using the same textural structure, making a cohesive style of work.”

Afterwards, she began experimenting with different color reactions in free-form glass, or glass not molded to dictate shape. “One of the things I love is to play with the way the metals in glass react when combined to create a third, iridescent color,” she says. “I like to use a flattened vase shape when featuring these reactions, as though the glass is a canvas.” Enameling on glass is another technique that, she says, combines her love of painting and glassblowing.

“I feel like I am just recently finding a flow to create work that feels unique to me and my experience,” she says. “My recent series of color landscapes is something that I started playing with more than eight years ago. I blow a very thin, colored glass bubble and then break it immediately. It is so thin that it cools down within seconds and I can pick up the pieces to torch them onto another glass vessel by hand. The pieces I made using this process years ago were much simpler and often cracked after cooling down because I didn’t know the proper way to make them. Now, I’ve revisited that process. I am deliberate about what colors I pick, how much of each color I put on the piece and how I use the torch to melt them back together. By using many more layers of color, I hope to emphasize color theory and the reactions created through the different metals in the colors’ composition.”

The attention that glassblowing requires quiets her brain as she works, Dahlia says. “This is very calming because usually my brain is very loud. In this way, I am soothed while making work because the only thing that exists is the work in front of me and the technique needed to bring it to life.”

Dahlia Bushwick’s business is DRBushwick Designs. Learn more at DRBushwickDesigns.com and follow on Instagram @dahliabushwick. Find her work regionally at Southern Highland Craft Guild’s galleries at the Folk Art Center, on Tunnel Road and at Moses Cone Manor.