Pamina Traylor Works

Biography

Pamina Traylor is an artist and educator, currently Senior Adjunct Professor at the California College of the Arts where she was Interim Chair of the Glass Program 1999–2000. In the fall of 2007, she was a visiting artist/faculty member of the Osaka University of Art. She has also served as a member of the Glass Art Society's board of directors from 2003 to 2011, and treasurer since 2006. She received her M.F.A. from the Rochester Institute of Technology and her B.A. from Bryn Mawr College, with additional studies at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Pilchuck Glass School, and San Francisco State University. The Creative Glass Center of America awarded her a fellowship in both 2003 and 1995 and she received a CCAC Faculty Development Grant in 1998. She has lectured and demonstrated at schools in Australia, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, and has taught workshops throughout world, including The Glass Furnace, Istanbul, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Penland School of Crafts, The Studio of the Corning Museum of Glass, and Urban Glass. She is in the permanent collection of the Benton Museum of Art, CT; The Museum of American Glass, NJ; The Speed Art Museum, KY; Tittot Glass Art Museum, Taiwan; and Cam Ocagi, Istanbul. She was featured on KQED public television's SPARK program, "By Hand".

Artist’s Statement

I am interested in certain dichotomies: strength/vulnerability, protection/confinement, and freedom/need and the way we find our point of balance between them—if, in fact, we do. My work often explores these dualities with respect to language and how we learn. I am curious about the way language and its subtext influences our values. The ideas are loosely based on writings of twentieth-century psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and his discussions of language and desire. He states that "the function of language is not to inform, but to evoke," which, for me, holds true for sculpture as well.