American

Julia Gray Hines Has formally studied architecture, commercial interior design, studio art and glass making. She has a BFA from Pratt Institute in New York and an MFA from Georgia State University. After many years working on large architectural teams as an interior designer in New York then in Atlanta, she decided to get back to her love of materials and making, turning her focus to smaller and more intimate projects. These initially were designs for sculptural light fixtures, but the ideas sort of ran away with themselves and demanded that Julia get fully immersed and figure out how to make them herself. Currently dividing her time between Savannah, Georgia where her furniture lives and Historic New Castle, Delaware where she has access to a full glass blowing and casting studio keeps her on her toes. Julia has taught college classes in drawing, CAD, construction materiality and design processes and firmly believes that drawing is the key design language artists must communicate in. She has been a flame-working demonstrator at Wheaton Center for the Arts in Millville, NJ for the past 2 years and continues to take classes in glass fabrication whenever possible to improve her skills. Her strengths lie in flame working and casting processes with glass. Casting combines the amazing tactile sensations of sculpting in clay with a resulting medium that is just pure joy to look at. Flameworking has become one of Julia’s greatest pleasures. Armed with new skills in glass making, Julia continues to explore the themes she has been investigating in other mediums for years; the push and pull between the built environment and the natural world. Recent work with bones and skulls in a Necrobiome context is an intentional celebration of the natural environment that surrounds us and still nurtures us…despite how badly we treat it. Julia has this to say about the medium of glass: “I have always loved glass…its luminance, it’s ability to glow with light, its slick and totally caress able surface and the amazing power of transparent colors that no other solid surface can equal. I am also seduced by it’s impracticality, it’s ridiculous expense and it’s temperamental insistence on smashing itself to pieces just when all is going so well. The fact is, only the very brave or the very stupid should even attempt to tame this beautiful but thoroughly wicked siren.”