10 to Watch: Tracy Glover

Founder
Tracy Glover Studio
www.tracygloverstudio.com

Glassblower Tracy Glover’s furnace burns 24 hours a day with molten glass always at the ready.

This unique artisan became mesmerized by a glassblower’s photo in a Rhode Island School of Design catalogue while studying architecture at Virginia Tech. She soon applied for a transfer and moved to Providence for the glass BFA that would change her life.

Career shift aside, she still looks back on her time as an architecture student with fondness. “As a freshman, my first professor was a Swiss-Italian man named Olivi Ferrari. He taught us that we don’t stop being artists once we walk out of the classroom. He said we should live our lives as artists, prepare food as an artist, begin our day as an artist,” she says. “That was really eye-opening for me, although I didn’t really get it until my first trip to Italy. Walking around Murano really got me excited about Italian glassblowing as a tradition, and I wanted to connect with the heritage and bring it forward into the U.S.”

And that’s exactly what she did. It was her sense of color and flow that made us stop dead in our tracks. Her lighting and decorative
accessories are bright, yet not overpowering, and marry hues together in triplicate for wonderful cane-stripe effects—a task that requires an incredible amount of delicacy and control.

But whether it’s a lamp, a hinge or a doorknob, she thinks every product should be equally beautiful and functional. She designs with the following always in the back of her mind: “If it doesn’t enhance your life, get rid of it.”