Glass blower’s work featured at two galleries

Stacey Siegel, maker of hand-blown miniature glass vases, perfume bottles and glass beads, is Kailua Village Artists featured artist for July.

Siegel began weaving seed beads for jewelry and accessories and working with glass in the early 1980s. From 1980 to 1984, Siegel began a stained-glass apprenticeship with Dan Herman, and from 1985 to 1989 she learned glass blowing with Charlie Miner. Apprenticeships were both in Tesuque, N.M. Between 1985 and 1986, she worked part-time with Pete Robison and learned cold working, glass grinding and polishing in New Mexico. In 1988, she started working and building her own business as a glass blower with different art galleries and trade shows. She expanded her glass art into slumping, fusing and bead making for jewelry.

In 1996, Siegel moved with her family to the Big Island and built her own studio on her property in South Kona, set up with furnaces and torches and started her business, Sieglass. She specializes in hand-blown miniature perfume bottles and vases. Each bottle is hand-blown with a silver overlay applied during the molten stage of the blowing process. No two bottles are exactly alike and the translucence of glass creates a gem-like quality.

Over the years, she has expanded her wearable art to include a line of torch-worked jewelry consisting of glass drops, handmade beads combined with her recycled hand-blown glass shards. Today, she continues to stretch herself artistically, taking her glass, new and recycled, and combining it with different, out-of-the-ordinary, mixed-media materials.

Siegel invites the public to see her latest work, talk story and learn about her glass blowing and jewelry making at the Kailua Village Artists Gallery at Alii Sunset Plaza on Monday. The gallery is open daily from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. The cooperative’s second gallery at the Outrigger Keauhou Beach Resort is open from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday.

Call 324-7060 or 329-6653 for more information.