ANN HOLLINGSWORTH
Ann Hollingsworth creates birds’ nests using the complex and long process of kiln cast glass. Her accomplishments and the accolades are many. Noted artist, art professor and essayist, Maria Porges states: Ann Hollingsworth’s spiky, luminous glass nests are metaphors. Their forms, invoking the intricate, twiggy constructions assembled by hawks or eagles, are perched on greenish, icy-looking slabs of glass or rough wooden blocks or stone boulders, all of which suggest a resting place between worlds—as if these complicated masses of translucent ‘twigs’ are portals, glowing from within as the glass captures light.”
But Hollingsworth’s art is more than a talented artist capturing light with a difficult process. What gives her beautiful work its special spirit and meaning is Hollingsworth’s childhood struggle and the importance birds played in it. Hollingsworth feels “bird.”
In her own words: “While making the nest, I remember the birds; I hear their songs; they are watching as I work and my nest, despite my intention, would not be their nest. It is a human nest; an imagining of a bird working without hands instinctively to make a nest. The more I work, the greater my appreciation grows for their work.
“I hope to illuminate our unconscious nature and our inseparable connection to this remarkable planet … We are all part of the same living matter, our boundaries are mental constructs which allow us to create a false sense of separation and thus of carelessness…I look around, what is around for us, for the birds? If we all pay attention, take better care, we can have better nesting for all of us.”
Hollingsworth studied glass making at California College of the Arts from 2000 until 2005, receiving a degree in sculpture. Additional studies were done at Corning Glass Museum, Pilchuck Glass School, KALA Institute as an artist in residence and at American Indian Art Institute in Santa Fe New Mexico. Her work is represented by Visions West Gallery in Bozeman, Montana, and Denver and by Seager Grey Gallery in Mill Valley.
