The Blue Sea Artisans featured member artist for the month of September is glass-blower and jewelry artist Stacey Siegel.
The Blue Sea Artisans featured member artist for the month of September is glass-blower and jewelry artist Stacey Siegel.
Siegel grew up with a strong attraction to glass. Her fascination grew from seed bead weaving, to stained glass and on to the hot glass world, which eventually kept her interest. Working in a glass-blowing studio/gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she began her apprenticeship. While other glassblowers continued to strive to work on large glass pieces, Siegel’s interests turned a different direction. She gathered and manipulated less glass on her glass-blower pipe, worked smaller and eventually perfected her art developing a signature line of miniature perfume bottles and vases. This soon led her working on a torch. She taught herself to make hand-blown glass beads. Torch working glass beads is a much more efficient and smaller studio set up. The mobility of it allowed her to pack up her studio and move to the Big Island 24 years ago, where she set up her own home studio.
Today on the slopes of Mauna Loa in South Kona, Siegel creates beaded jewelry using her own hand-torched glass beads, along with other glass components and metal fabrications she has developed her own signature style of jewelry. Among her featured jewelry pieces are her hand torched rainbow glass beaded bracelets and necklaces and her glass drop necklaces and earrings.
Stacey Siegel will be working at the gallery on Saturday and Sept. 18. The gallery, located in the Keauhou Shopping Center, is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Thursday, noon to 6 p.m. on Friday and from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday.
For more information, call the gallery at (808) 329-8000.
