HomeStudio Tour: Glass artist Heather Hancock
26. May, 2010 
9 Comments
Art is cognitive exercise; it’s maybe the adult form of play,” says Evanston-based glass artist Heather Hancock. “I think our brain needs these hyper-normal inputs.”
Heather needed them so much that she left her career as a speech language pathologist specializing in traumatic brain injuries to pursue her passion for art. But she hasn’t left her work behind entirely. Heather is developing a visual language to address the same concepts in her intricate glass mosaics that she addressed in her career: memory, attention, self and metacognition.
“Thinking about thinking,” explains Heather. “How do you remember to remember? Narrative self or sense of self is so mediated socially and through language.”
As a speech pathologist, Heather worked with stroke victims who experienced firsthand how losing the ability to speak could impact sense of self. As an artist, Heather’s work gives her a different way to explore the nature of consciousness and identity.
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Bend #6
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“Bend is literally about the narrative self,” explains Heather. “There’s a core person. While it evolves, there’s always a cohesive pattern.”
Although Heather says she loved her work, it was missing an aesthetic component that had become increasingly important to her. Inspired by the glass she saw during a trip to Italy fifteen years ago, Heather begin to experiment with the medium of on her own, eventually returning to take a master class in Venice. (She thinks I should give it another chance).
“Art has to get your attention and sustain your attention so you engage with it,” says Heather. “There has to be some component that is compelling and narrative.”
Using glass enables Heather to create dynamic compositions that change and evolve under different conditions as individual pieces of the mosaic appear and disappear, gloss and varnish.
“There’s this psychological component, and you find yourself seeing (pieces using glass) in different ways across time,” says Heather. “I think glass gets relegated to craft, but it’s a powerful medium.”
I agree. Thanks Heather! Stay tuned for Heather’s Open House!
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Click here for Heather’s website. Click here for Heather’s Facebook page. I liked it! Get it? I liked it? Thumbs up?
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From Heather’s Emerge series. Note the pattern completion.
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Realize #2
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Fizz #2
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Fuse
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Recall #4
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A work in progress.
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Emerge series
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stunning art. What a talent!! Great photos too.
What a great workshop. I love Fizz #2.
Tate. love love your photos!! you rock for generating a coherent narrative out of our free-wheeling conversation. as soon as you mentioned you’d been reading about ‘emergence,’ I knew I could ‘go there’ with my art+science obsession! : )
When I re-read my notes from our conversation last night, I realized that as free-wheeling as our conversation seemed, a coherent narrative emerged spontaneously from the discussion. How apropos! Thanks Heather. I really enjoyed your insights.
Gorgeous photos! Each one looks is a perfect still life. Tate, looking forward to reading more entries on your blog.
I’m the lucky person who gets the “river runs through it” installation Heather is designing for our home in Nova Scotia–(sketches lying on Heather’s worktable in your photos)–just seeing the sketches makes me tingle…
Heather, Heather, Heather! So glad I got to see your studio finally! I am so inspired by the color, design and THOUGHT of your work! Suzanne Daley sent me this link, hope you don’t mind! Hope you had a great time at home this summer!
-Maggie
Hey Maggie. So glad you found this!! Love how many studio images Tate posted. Really gives you a sense of it. But come visit in person!!!! We’re enjoying every minute of summer; hope you are too!