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Field Notes, a site-specific exhibition created in response to the land, architecture, history, and culture of Caithness, Scotland, opened on August 9th, 2019 with a whirlwind event that capped over two weeks of intensive installation. Visitors descended on the small Manse, garden, and Byre to celebrate the work of artists Annie Cattrell, Anne Vibeke Mou, Anne Petters, and Jeff Zimmer. But let’s step back a bit: before the event, before the bagpipers, before the lights were set. Before groans, curses, and aching backs that accompanied the installation of the show, I arrived to a near empty space. 

Emerge 2018 is Bullseye Glass Co.'s tenth biennial juried exhibition for rising talent in kiln-glass. Three jurors were tasked with reviewing hundreds of entries, selecting a group of  finalists, and then selecting seven award winners. After the jury process ended, Bullseye Projects curator Michael Endo sat down with jurors Heidi Schwegler, Diane Wright, and Benedict Heywood to discuss the award winners, the competition, and the landscape of contemporary glass. An edited excerpt of that conversation is published in the catalog Emerge/Evolve 2018: A Showcase of Rising and Evolving Talents in Kiln-Glass.

In this final part of the conversation, the jurors discuss three honorable mention works and offer some advice for future applicants. In addition to Michael Endo and the jurors, Mary Kay Nitchie, Bullseye's Marketing Manager, and Lani McGregor, Director of Bullseye Projects, were present.

In August of 2019, a new exhibition will open in The Byre, a remote exhibition space situated in the northernmost county in Scotland. Titled Field Notes, the exhibition will feature site specific works by Annie Cattrell, Anne Vibeke Mou, Anne Petters, and Jeff Zimmer. Each of these artists, through site visits and a group residency, has developed a series of works responding to the unique landscape, culture, and architecture of Caithness. Artists Annie Cattrell and Anne Vibeke Mou, in particular, are exploring the relationships between human activity and the land through empirical, geologic, and anthropological research.

On a rocky cliff overlooking the waters of the North Sea, the dirt and grass beneath my feet only just covers layers of sedimentary rock that was formed at the bottom of a lake 370 million years ago. Caithness, the northernmost county in Scotland, as well as the barely visible Orkney Islands and the distant Shetland Islands, were once covered by a massive Devonian lake. Eons of time, geologic pressure, tectonic shifts, and rising and receding waters pushed this rugged, stony coastline above the waves.

Millions of years after its formation, this stone was quarried to create dwellings, cairns, brochs, ritual gatherings of standing stones, and fortifications; offering layers of human history told to us through stone. Around three hundred years ago, stones, unearthed from an adjacent field, were stacked into a series of joined buildings whose history is threadbare and speculative. For a time it housed animals and possibly people. Later, farming equipment. Later still, it became a garage. Its current and unlikely incarnation is that of a remote art exhibition space called The Byre.

Emerge 2018 is Bullseye Glass Co.'s tenth biennial juried exhibition for rising talent in kiln-glass. Three jurors were tasked with reviewing hundreds of entries, selecting a group of finalists, and then selecting seven award winners. After the jury process ended, Bullseye Projects curator Michael Endo sat down with jurors Heidi Schwegler, Diane Wright, and Benedict Heywood to discuss the award winners, the competition, and the landscape of contemporary glass. An edited excerpt of that conversation is published in the catalog Emerge/Evolve 2018: A Showcase of Rising and Evolving Talents in Kiln-Glass.

Emerge 2018 is Bullseye Glass Co.'s tenth biennial juried exhibition for rising talent in kiln-glass. Three jurors were tasked with reviewing hundreds of entries, selecting a group of  finalists, and then selecting seven award winners. After the jury process ended, Bullseye Projects curator Michael Endo sat down with jurors Heidi Schwegler, Diane Wright, and Benedict Heywood to discuss the award winners, the competition, and the landscape of contemporary glass. An edited excerpt of that conversation is published in the catalog Emerge/Evolve 2018: A Showcase of Rising and Evolving Talents in Kiln-Glass.

In February of 2018 I was in London representing Bullseye Projects at Collect, an international fair for modern craft and design, when artist Heidi Schwegler called, informing me that we were to become neighbors in the Mojave desert. It was only a few weeks prior that Heidi Schwegler had expressed disbelief when my wife and I confided that we were building a studio in Yucca Valley, California. Fast forward to today and we are all living in the desert, building a studio together, in the middle of a working relationship that began in 2015 when I assisted Schwegler in creating her first work in kiln-glass, introducing her to the material and process.

Emerge 2018 is Bullseye Glass Co.'s tenth biennial juried exhibition for rising talent in kiln-glass. Three jurors were tasked with reviewing hundreds of entries, selecting a group of  finalists, and then selecting seven award winners. After the jury process ended, Bullseye Projects curator Michael Endo sat down with jurors Heidi Schwegler, Diane Wright, and Benedict Heywood to discuss the award winners, the competition, and the landscape of contemporary glass. An edited excerpt of that conversation is published in the catalog Emerge/Evolve 2018: A Showcase of Rising and Evolving Talents in Kiln-Glass.

After eight years at Bullseye Glass Co., Portland-based artist Nathan Sandberg left his position as a technician at the Klaus Moje Center for Research and Education to focus on his studio practice and teaching. Simultaneously, Sandberg launched OnGrade Studio, a branch of his practice that focuses on functional and decorative design. 

As a child, Hungarian artist and designer Marta Edöcs collected glass beads. She would arrange and string them into pieces of jewelry. Years later, after studying drawing and painting in school, she returned to glass and says that the “joy and playfulness” of the material reminded her of the experiences she had as a child. Since then, Edöcs has studied with masters of the material and has distinguished herself as an artist and designer. The Shop at Bullseye Projects is pleased to present a series of jewelry pieces from Edöcs' classic Zen and Shape series as well as pieces from her newest, nature-inspired collection for which she won the Semi Grand Prix Award at the Silver Accessories Contest in Tokyo, Japan.

Marzena Krzemińska-Baluch is an internationally recognized artist based in Wrocław, Poland. She has received numerous grants and awards including Emerging Artist in Residence from Pilchuck Glass School. In 2016, she was the Silver Award winner in Bullseye Glass Company's biennial Emerge competition. Her newest body of work offers unconventional, wall-based glass sculptures comprised of rigid metal frames contrasting with delicately folded glass panels. Combining her work with that of Matthew Day Perez, the exhibition Break, Mend, Fold challenges and celebrates our material assumptions of glass and its properties. In conjunction with the exhibition, I asked Marzena a little about her past and her current studio practice.

"It is the work that must speak, and if the work doesn't speak, nothing can help." - Klaus Moje

In 2012, I was fortunate enough to interview Klaus Moje when he was a juror for Bullseye's Emerge competition. I revisited that interview recently, hunting for pithy quotes that could be held up as examples of his passion for craftsmanship, art, glass, and education. I soon realized, however, that I would not find what I was searching for. Not because he was in any way inarticulate, but because his true eloquence was expressed in the studio and in the classroom; making, forging relationships, and maintaining relentless curiosity.

The Shop at Bullseye Projects presents Chakra Enhancers, a jewelry collection by Brooklyn-based artist and designer Rachel Rader. The collection, an extension of Rader’s ongoing Ancient Truth Investigators (ATI) project, combines metaphysical science fiction with hand-crafted wearable sculptures and jewelry. 

Heidi Schwegler is a self-described city person with an aversion to nature. Despite this, she can regularly be found working in far-flung, remote studios embedded in natural settings. In recent years, she has been a symposium participant at North Lands Creative Glass in the northernmost county of Scotland, was a resident at Yaddo in upstate New York, and was a fellow at the prestigious MacDowell Colony. It is not surprising then, that she recently found herself amongst the Douglas fir trees at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington.