Influences
Candi first took up glass as an art form through lampworking with a class at the Corcoran School of Art with John Winter in 2008. As she had more time to devote to art and knew she had found the right combination of sculptural design and challenging material in glass. She became more interested in borosilicate/scientific glass and studied for several years with Robert Kincheloe at the Workhouse Arts Center. She is inspired by the kinetic sculptural works of Bandhu Dunham, the abstract voluptuousness of Deborah Carlson’s sculptural glass and prints, and the playful forms of Carmen Lozar. She is currently a Resident Artist in Building 7 at the Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, Virginia. She has shown her work in local shows in Northern Virginia and juried into the Glass National Exhibition in 2018.
Glass as a material is very old, but its applications are also very modern. With technical improvements as a material, it is increasingly being incorporated in our lives at every practical level. Glass leads cultures into major technological and material change. Understanding the material while working it as a sculptor takes one’s mind to many eras of human development. Candi looks to the art movements of early half the previous century: Modernist, Surrealist, Netsuke carvings from Japan and the Objet Trouve sculptures of Marcel DuChamp for grounding. She believes the interwar period between the World Wars I and II, in particular, was a time of cultural shift that forced many once traditional people to accept a quickly modernizing world into their daily lives. Shifting paradigms, new materials disrupted daily lives. Surrealism and playfulness in words, music and art were a method of relieving the stress of change. Shifty, unpredictable and unstable, glass has as much surreal humor as any material. A Jungian at heart, Candi looks for the old stories of change, the humor even, that the glass wants to express in the new items that come out of her hands.
