Andy Paiko Works

Biography

The true value of the glass craft continues to reveal itself as an occupation worthy of a lifetime of study. After graduating from the studio art program at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, and apprenticing a handful of very talented individuals, Andy Paiko and three partners successfully built and operated the Central Coast Glass Artists’ Studio (C.C.G.A.S.). He currently resides in the Pacific Northwest, where he continues to study new methods of coloration, patterning, and form, including everything from vessel-ware to assembled sculpture and custom design. 

Artists Statement

My career as a glass artist began unexpectedly, yet has evolved as a function of my personality. Glass has become my primary voice, my way of communicating experience, and my creative focus. I love what I do.

The most commonly held image of a glassblower is of a somewhat romanticized craftsman surrounded by flaming furnaces, making vases and bowls and drinking vessels, water jugs and little decorative horses for countertop and mantle. Though this is for the most part accurate, I consider my goal as an artist to examine the role of glass in relation to its function. Must a vessel be used in order to be functional? Does a functionless sculpture have a real purpose outside of aesthetic contemplation? If so, does its creator have to take responsibility for making something that is otherwise useless?

These questions have led me away from abstraction towards a symbolic way of dealing with the form/function relationship. Each piece could be metaphorical; it could comment on the difficulty of decision making in everyday life, the relationship of society with nature or language, or the way the mind grasps experience through dreams. But further, I want to make things that try to both communicate AND imitate purpose.

The glassblowing process is an additive one, much like our personalities. Rather than a form emerging from a block of solid stone reductively, forms of glass are pushed into space organically by a cumulative history of layering and motion. My object-making process has developed to extend this layering, whereby many separate, individual glass parts are fused cold, away from the furnace to form a collage of sorts. This allows for a degree of detail and complexity difficult to achieve on the end of a blowpipe.