Nadine Saylor
Alfred, NY
July-August 2008
Project Description
In one of the local antique stores, I made two discoveries that took my work in new directions. The first was a box of fabric containing several different sets of lace table runners and the second was a year of Peterson’s magazine from 1887 that was bound into a book. The lace was a relic of a family’s history that was lost for me to find. The book had incredible engravings of women in the woods and different places, embroidery patterns and fashion plates of women in fancy dresses.
My work addresses issues in women’s liberation as regards to the domestic role of staying at home and doing housework. I use lace and personal objects to symbolize vague memories from my childhood, so finding this box of lace was like a missing puzzle piece. Imprints from objects that sat upon them for years created a mystery in my mind. The lost heritage of lace mirrors the industrial landscape of Utica today, so many buildings just sitting there vacant and so depressed. On one of my bike rides, I discovered one of the old buildings of Utica called the Charleston Building, a falling down old building with a mix of bricks and wood on the ground. The façade was barely hanging on and there was a forest growing in the middle of it. It was just like the fabric I found; abandoned.
The next day at the Historical Society, I found a map of the Savage Arms Corporation, which is what this building used to be. Guns and ammunition were what they manufactured at this factory. As fascinated as I was with textile and history, I wanted to use it to engrave on some glass. I had been photographing many of the concave turret windows and wanted to find one too. On the way to see the museum show at Hamilton College the next day, I recovered some of the antique windows that were being replaced and began engraving some of these images on the glass with my flex shaft. This was a new challenge for me. I also started to add different elements of glass and metal to the frames of these windows to give them dimension.
Sculpture Space had given me the opportunity of find deeper insight into my works in ways that I didn’t know existed. It has offered me the time to research, experiment and develop my artistic voice necessary in furthering myself as an artist.
About the Artist
Nadine Saylor graduated from Alfred University in May 2007 with her Masters of Fine Art in Sculpture Dimensional Studies. After blowing glass for twelve years and working with many different masters in glassblowing, she began casting glass as well as working in mixed media sculpture. She went to the University of the Arts for Photography in the mid-nineties where she studied the human form creating shapes with the light and shadow reflected on the fleshy body. Her sculptures deal with the human condition and the idea of self-consciousness. Her sense of humor and whimsy can be understood by people of all ages. Her work has been shown in Glass Quarterly and American Craft Magazine.
Most recently she has been adjunct professor for the past year teaching various Glass Casting and Glassblowing classes at Alfred University in the glass department. She has taught classes at the Pittsburgh Glass Center and “The Studio” at the Corning Museum of Glass. Currently, she is a resident at Sculpture Space in Utica, NY and will be teaching a class at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina at the end of the summer with Eddie Bernard of Wet Dog Glass. She will start a new job in the fall as an Instructor in the glass department at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. In August of 2009 she will have her first solo show at the Deleware Valley Arts Allience in Narrowsburg, NY.