Pearl Dick Interview - Magazine TM

Full interview transcript below

Photograph by Dane Thomas

A Rekindling, On Connection & Community

Magazine TM Interview with Pearl Dick

Hello, I’m Pearl Dick. I am a glass artist.

I’ve been working with glass for over 25 years, she/her pronouns, and we’re sitting here right now in Firebird Community Arts, which is a studio on the west side of Chicago that I helped to co-found. We work with young people on the south and west sides, teaching glassblowing and ceramics, and we do a program called Project Fire that works specifically with young people who have been injured by gun violence as a way to heal from that trauma.

I’ve always done art my whole life, but was predominantly a painter. And when at some point I had decided I wanted to go to school for art, and I was looking around at schools to study painting, and mostly like traditional representational type of painting. I’d actually never even known that glass was an option. My high school art teacher had told me about a school, Alfred University, that she knew about and I loved her so I was like I’ll just go check it out. But I already had my heart set on these really traditional programs. I was looking at RISD, I was looking at Boston University, I was looking at Yale for painting. And I went to Alfred and that’s where I saw glass for the first time. And I really honestly just knew that is what I’m going to do. I’m going to do this, I’m going to come here and learn this, and that was my introduction into glass. I had no idea it was even a thing before that. So, I have not looked back since then.

It’s so rare. So rare you get that opportunity. And I mean, it doesn’t mean that you won’t jump around and continue to do other things or explore things, but yeah, I knew right away that glass was my thing from the start.

Yeah, I mean, it was amazing. The folks that were there at the time were more into teaching us how to be artists and not necessarily how to be incredible technicians. Which is fine, you know, that was actually kind of a nice thing to be able to like go and play and experiment and think like an artist. But to be honest you know no offense to my teachers, when I left school I really had very little skill like I didn’t know how to do anything. I mean I knew how to do some things but I wasn’t a great glassblower but I had so much fun I was able to think creatively with that material and learn how to work together. But it wasn’t until after I left school and got a job blowing glass, like actually doing just kind of mundane production work that I really honed my skills, my technical skills. And it’s a never-ending journey with glass. You’re just always learning all the time.

I moved across the country. I was originally heading to Seattle, Washington, which is kind of like a Mecca for glass in this country. And just the way the fates happened, I ended up in Portland, Oregon. I had met somebody whose name was Chris Rich. He’s still Blowing Glass today, Rich Glass Studios. He was making these little hanging vases. They were straight to production. We’d take like six to eight minutes to make a single one. We’d do the same thing all day, eight hours a day. I had one job. It was very repetitive and, you know, kind of mind numbing, you know, it’s like I got to be a better glass blower just by working with the material that way every day.

I sure was. Yeah, I was still making work. I was still experimenting with glass. I was still painting. I’ve always painted all the way through and still do. But yeah, I was making work and showing in galleries. My friends were all artists and we had artist communes and we did shows and a lot of mixed media stuff, a lot of installation stuff.

A lot of like situationist stuff. Just playing and having fun and being an artist and you know, in my twenties just trying everything.

You know, it’s interesting, we were talking about Picasso earlier and you just saw that show at the Art Institute, but it’s like, I’ve always drawn, painted, sculpted faces, heads, people. That’s always been something, that’s the topic that interests me, is people, humanity, connection. And so the human body’s always shown up in my work, in particular, the head of the face. I remember I had a teacher at some point who said, you gotta lose the figure in your work, you can’t, you know, you’ll never be taken seriously. It was kind of a blow, because that’s what I like to do.

It’s what I was drawn to kind of naturally. So I took kind of a departure from that for a while to try to just push myself in different ways. And it was miserable. I felt like for a while it wasn’t super fun. But then I had another instructor later when I had recounted this story and he had said, well, you know, Picasso never lost the figure and people took that guy seriously. And so I was like, okay, I’m just gonna do what I want to do.

Faces, and people, and humanity, I feel like are really well represented in the human, in like a human head and like a face. For me it’s a way to show personality. But in the way of doing that I do intentionally keep them not gender specific, not race specific. I like to keep them kind of androgynous, so they represent humanity and not like a particular person per se.

And then you can play with how we all connect to each other. And then how color comes in using not realistic colors and the portrayal of these pieces to me is also not about skin tone for me or representing a certain race or ethnicity or even styles. It’s more of, you know, hairstyles or, you know, physical attributes, outside of just a human, recognizable human head. And then colors, I’ll use all different colors, and drawing on my painting background, layering colors. And with glass, there’s a way that you can take powdered glass color and sift it onto glass and brush it away in some way so it’ll stick in one place and wipe away in others. And you can really, really layer just you can with painting, but then having a red head and a yellow head and a green head and a purple head, like all of these different colors that are not exactly flesh tones to come together to again represent us as a people in general.

I have done a series of pieces recently that are black heads and white heads that are put together. I talk about this with some of the young folks that I work with too about what they see, what their interpretation is of that representation. I’ll get a lot of things about how it’s opposites or it’s about black people and white people, or it’s about being somehow, you know, like in opposition. But for me, it’s really, it is about a contrast. It’s about difference, but not necessarily race specific.

It went kind of disastrously, technically, which was wonderful too, because it was messy, the way humans come together.

It worked, it worked, but technically I got a lot more proficient at it later. It worked, it survived, it made it out, it exists somewhere, I think, it went to somebody at some point. But it was not technically very sound, like, it’s not the way I would do it now. And I was kind of flying by the seat of my pants, I was not in control of the process at all. It was intentional but at the time when I first started mashing these together I didn’t have enough control of the medium to make it do exactly what I wanted and I was really kind of left to the devices of what happened which made some really beautiful results.

It led me down a path of really seeing how glass was a great medium to use for this, for that message of connection. Because the glass, I squished the pieces together so I was sculpting the individual pieces real specifically but then when I tried to put them together that process distorted them and mixed them and mashed them and it was kind of beautiful the way that happened so it’s a happy accident.

(Learning how to operate and run a glass blowing studio was…)

Challenging, rewarding, insane, necessary. I’ll stop there.

I could think of more, but those were top of minds.

Well I’m constantly learning and I’ve been doing this work of a glass for over 25 years and for the first six to seven years I had no clue really. All of that learning you know has all contributed to where I’m today but it’s just a medium that’s constantly teaching you. There were specific challenges to building a studio that, I mean, I’d never built a furnace from scratch before. And I had to do that at one point because I didn’t have the funds to buy a brand new one. And I just, I learned on the job. I basically learned to o what I needed to do as I needed to do it. And so that process is ongoing. And glass is a new enough medium. That we’re all still kind of still experimenting and learning and discovering new technologies within this media. But I listen to it. I listen to the material and I do what I need to do and learn what I need to learn to do what I need to do. If that makes sense.

So the glass itself… hi guys! hehehehe… So the glass itself, we work with the glass at around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s when it’s like molten and gooey and perfect to get out of the furnace and then there’s a range of working with it hot between like you know 1200 degrees when it’s first starts moving a little bit to like that molten state around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit

The preheating chambers, the glory holes that we use, are usually right around that same temperature, around 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. So yeah, it’s very hot material.

It’s silica, sand. There are certain fluxes that are in it, depending on what type of glass you’re using to help it flow.

It’s an amorphous solid, which is pretty cool. It changes, its structure changes and its properties change through the process of working with it from like coal to molten.

Is that what your notes are on, that tiny paper? Hahaha

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It’s a rainbow.

That is actually a big part of the design process. Yeah, you’re absolutely right on the money with that. And some people probably don’t create that way or maybe can’t create that way, but I mean, I’ve… I also have a side business where I pack and install glass. And I’ve done enough side jobs as an artist, as many of us will do, to let, like I’ve seen, I’ve received other artists’ work that I’ve unpacked and had to install. And you learn a lot about an artist when you receive their work and see how they packed it and what they expect you to figure out to get their work safely installed. And that always stuck with me. And I do remember the first time I sold a piece to like at a gallery, from a gallery.

That I had to pack. I had packed it with all sorts of old couch cushions and random stuff. It looked like a rat’s nest essentially. And the gallery, you know, helped me realize that somebody just paid a lot of money for this piece, they’re going to get it, they’re going to open it and that’s going to be their impression. That’s one thing. So that was a good lesson. But also the safety of the piece and also there are things that you can do in the process to consider how you want to display it. You can make your life so much easier down the road, like when the work lives beyond you and it’s not you installing it or you packing it or youre shipping it and whatnot. You can really consider a lot about how you design the creation of a piece with keeping how it’s going to travel in mind, with how it’s going to go up in mind. Even processes that you can do hot that will maybe make it safer than a process you would do cold or like a stand or display. I mean the materials aside, like just even how you design the piece to be able to be viable is important. But I mean in terms of the materials, it’s utilitarian in a way like that arc you mentioned was steel and it was mounted on the wall to like hold up the glass pieces and that was really it was functionality but I tried to make it something that was not as much of an element in the piece in that instance. So it was more about the glass and it was just like a structure that could put it where I wanted it to be in conjunction with itself.

But there are other things where, you know, how the work is displayed or what it’s displayed around is really intentional and really important. So that’s, yeah, that’s always part of the design process for me and for a lot of thoughtful artists that I know.

I wish you had seen this last one I did. It was a glass head with a lot of really fragile flowers and an accoutrement around the crown of the head. And there’s just no good way to wrap that without those... so I ended up taking foam, like rigid foam, and I cut like segments that would hold the neck solid.

So that it looked like this the piece was wearing a big turtle neck. And then like the flowers were all just in air in space so that when I wrap the box you could turn it every which way and the piece would stay put and nothing would come in contact with those flowers. were all just in air in space so that when I wrap the box you could turn it every which way and the piece would stay put and nothing would come in contact with those flowers. But you can use all sorts of stuff. None of it’s sustainable all of its awful it’s like bubble wrap and foam and cardboard and suppose you can recycle cardboard

Your little notes are so funny, Ray. It’s cracking me up.

They’re related. They go hand in hand because they’re part of who I am, they’re part of what I do. I have to say that in particular for me, my art, my practice is this studio, is this nonprofit, that we do here to work with young folks to use art and in particular glass to heal and to lift people up and to help people just realize their worth and their potential and get to do something that a lot of people don’t get to do. It’s just really special. That work is as much my practice as making a thing. And I consider it my artwork. My artwork often, the physical pieces that I make, often speak to that. And again, it always comes back to our humanity and our connections with each other, how we influence and impact each other, how we interact with each other with our similarities

So it’s very much interrelated to me.

So much, so much. I’m so inspired. I’m inspired by this eclipse happening right now. I just found out today that there was another total solar eclipse in 1919, which I’ve been very immersed in that year because I’m working on a project here with a commemorative project. Of the Chicago race riot that happened in 1919. And to find out that there was also a solar eclipse in 1919, and it was how scientists had-

I know. Yeah. And I feel the energy, like I can already feel the energy, but, and also to know that scientists had been able to actually test for the theory of relativity, Einstein’s theory of relativity, because of that 1919 eclipse, just blew my mind. But artists, so those, everything is inspiring to me right now.

I just saw Faith Ringgold’s exhibition at the MCA, which to be able to see a woman and an activist, a black woman activist through an entire lifetime of work to me is so inspiring. Vanessa German is an artist who I absolutely adore and consider a friend. But the way she combines her poetry with her deeply personal art, how deep she goes emotionally, how much she cares, how much she sees and how raw and vulnerable she is and what she puts out there is really inspiring to me. Grace Whiteside is another artist and friend who is doing some really, really interesting stuff, with glass as a medium that is amorphous, as I’ve mentioned before, and a constant state of transition. But using glass in performance to talk about non-binary identities and trans identities, and using glass to do that to me is just brilliant. And it hasn’t been done in the way that they’re doing it now. Just such cool stuff going on. I could go on and on with such amazing artists and humans that are inspiring me everyday. My young people, the young people that we work with inspire me every single day. Like again, could go on and on. Well, you know, I guess for me a trademark would be more of like a signature or something I’m known for, which at this point has be come these sculpted glass heads. I would say that’s my trademark. I certainly don’t own the rights to that as like a trademark implies and would never try to say that that was mine alone. But it is something that people recognize because I’ve been making them for a long time and I, I make them in a different way than other people do so they look kind of distinct and that said there’s a whole bunch of young folks who are making them like that now too so they’ll be more more like that in that style out there in the world.