Carmen Lozar: The Art of the Story
Spilling out from their bottles, bowls, cartons and cans, Carmen Lozar’s flameworked characters tell a story about how messy life can be. These small narratives in her new series, Spills, accentuate the movement and flow of glass but also speak volumes about our relationship to the world.
“I have found myself drawn to glass for the innate sense of motion it can bring to a work of art. While the intrinsic motion of most materials becomes paralyzed at the touch of the human hand, glass, as an amorphous solid, never relinquishes its visual motility. I have chosen to pursue a career in glass sculpture not only for my love of the material, but also because there is so much left to be explored within the field of flameworking and the medium itself.”
Art has always played an essential role in Lozar’s life, growing up with a mother who performed puppet shows and a father who created scale ship models and watercolor renditions of the ramshackle barns on the outskirts of town. During undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Lozar interned at the Bullseye Glass Factory in Portland, Oregon, and attended Pilchuck Glass School as a Saxe award recipient and staff member. Upon completion of her BFA, the young artist travelled to China, Indonesia, Thailand, and India to explore eastern traditional art. Back in the US, she moved to the Southwest and opened a casting and flameworking facility in Tucson, Arizona. Work from this period was exhibited in numerous shows, including SOFA, Chicago. In 2003 Lozar completed her post-graduate degree at Alfred University, New York.
Born in 1975, Lozar lives in Bloomington-Normal, Illinois where she maintains a studio and is a member of the art faculty at Illinois Wesleyan University. She has taught at Pilchuck Glass School, Penland School of Craft, Pittsburgh Glass School, Appalachian Center for Crafts, The Chrysler Museum, and the Glass Furnace in Istanbul, Turkey. She has had residencies at the Corning Museum of Glass and Penland School of Craft. Although she travels abroad to teach and share her love for glass – most recently to Turkey, Italy, and New Zealand – she always returns to her Midwestern roots.
“The sculpture I create with glass is meant to inspire and provoke imagination. Telling stories has always been my primary objective. Some narratives are sad, funny, or thoughtful but my pieces are always about celebrating life. My most current body of work deals with spills.”
In summer 2019, Lozar taught her Small Scale, Large Impact Masterclass at the Seventh International Festival of Glass, Stourbridge UK, as well as flameworking classes at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Penland School of Crafts, and UrbanGlass in Brooklyn, New York. In 2020, Lozar will teach flameworking at SW Art Glass, in Phoenix, AZ, January 4-5 and Pilchuck’s Session 3.
Lozar is represented by the Ken Saunders Gallery in Chicago, and her work is included in the permanent collection at Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass, Neenah, Wisconsin.