Sirius Glassworks

Peter Gudrunas Has Been Blowing Glass Since the 1970s. Now His Daughter is Helping to Bring Their Practice Into the 21st Century.

The 2008 financial crisis wiped out the majority of Gudrunas’ clients, and in the following years the interest in buying fine crafts sputtered. It wasn’t until 2014 that the business was revived, when his youngest daughter, artist and filmmaker Iris Fraser-Gudrunas, stepped in to manage, eventually developing a vision for how Sirius Glassworks could evolve.
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Week Of July 6, 2020

A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: master glass blowers empowered lady edition, the dawn of the "rufflessance," two photo fundraisers to kickstart your art collection, and a London office that has us nostalgic for workplace life.
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The Designer Behind Your Favorite Shell-Shaped Accessories Just Dropped a New Collection

Where do you go when your last collection captured the Zeitgeist to a T? That's the dilemma that faced Rosa Rubio of the Barcelona-based Los Objetos Decorativos, whose saturated pastel ceramic seashell vases and catchalls went epically viral when they were released two years ago. For her latest collection, Rubio turned to another material that's been trending — colored glass — and again made it her own.
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This Canadian Designer — Known for His Woodwork — Is Making the Most Epic Glass

When we posted our New York Design Week round-ups earlier this spring, there was one project we held for later because it was just. that. gorgeous. Amidst a sea of walnut, bronze, maple, and steel at Vancouver-based designer Jeff Martin's booth, we spied these craggy, colorful glass vessels, glinting under the lights of the Javits. Turns out, when we reached out to Martin for more information, that the process by which they're made — from the remnants of past projects — is as interesting as the way they look.
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Experiments in Colored Glass, Inspired by the Palette of Mexico

As avowed colored glass evangelists, we practically consider it our saintly duty to bring your attention to one of the coolest, most beautiful glass objects we've seen in years: As part of a residency program supported by the Swiss Design Mexico program and the Swiss Embassy in Mexico, Swiss designer Julie Richoz spent the last year developing these two-toned Isla vases in collaboration with the glass-blowing masters at Nouvel Studio.
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Thaddeus Wolfe, Glass Artist

When asked if he identifies more as an artist or a designer, Thaddeus Wolfe seems genuinely stumped. But perhaps it’s that way for anyone working with glass, a material that’s notoriously hard to confine: “I don’t think I’m a great designer,” he muses. “Maybe it’s because I’m not a master of glass yet that I never quite get what I intend. But sometimes cool things happen from mistakes.” It’s a pretty self-deprecating summation of process coming from someone whose chaotic, mysteriously opaque Assemblage vases for MatterMade are the subject of a solo exhibition opening tomorrow at Chicago’s Volume Gallery, which has in the year and a half since it opened become somewhat of a barometer for the Next Big Thing.
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J. & L. Lobmeyr

Since its founding six generations ago, Lobmeyr has tended to follow its own compass rather than listening to the whims of the market — in other words, it’s never been afraid to be a little bit different. It’s why the company moved from its original role as glass merchants to manufacturers; what inspired a relationship with the radical designers of the Wiener Werkstätte; and why the company today collaborates with designers like Polka, whose 2008 beer glasses boast an engraving based on the goals scored during a 1978 soccer match between Austria and Germany.
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Scholten & Baijings, Product Designers

The story of Stefan Scholten and Carole Baijings began, like many Dutch stories do, in a church. In the late ’90s, Baijings was working for an agency whose headquarters were located inside one of the country’s many abandoned houses of worship. Scholten, a graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven, had a burgeoning design practice nearby. Scholten was asked to design a small bar for the agency’s office, and “the rest is history,” says Baijings.
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