(gentle music) (dramatic music) - It's within me to be a creator, a maker of something.

Some people can make their best work when they are feeling depressed, but for me it's the opposite.

I have to be happy.

(dramatic music) Seattle really is just a big neighborhood.

It was a place for us to grow.

We all have a gift of some sort.

It's just my vision of what I see.

Fear allows you to hit harder and be more.

There's a sense of hope that your story will survive longer than you will.

(gentle music) (flame thrower humming) I started off as a ceramist.

I worked with ceramics first.

I went to Pratt Art Center.

I had a friend and I was watching him and I said, "You know, this medium will be perfect for what I'm trying to say."

I need that fluid movement.

And when glass is hot, it's fluid and you can stop and freeze it at any point.

And I really liked that.

But this is in the '80s and back then they didn't have women blowing glass really.

And so when they told me that I couldn't do it, of course I had to try to do it so I just started working.

I started working for people for free because I couldn't get any other way in the shop.

I was a charger at Pratt and I would clean the whole building and charge the furnace and wash the cullet till about two in the morning.

And I have one daughter, a niece, and a nephew, that I was taking care of.

And I had a '69 Chevy C10 Carryall.

And I turned the back of it into like a bed.

And then I would take them in to the print department and set up homework and play time for them.

And then they'd fall asleep and I carried them one by one and put 'em in my truck and drive back out to West Seattle.

And then we do the whole routine over again.

That's how I was able to start 'cause I couldn't afford to pay for classes either.

What do we do with doing this?

I just kept working from there and then growing and developing.

And then I met my husband and he invited me over to the shop.

(upbeat music) I was working for Dale Chihuly at the time, and I was a colorist who, the person who picks up all the color and melts it.

And it was a great job because when Dale comes down to set up for working or any artist, their sketches on the wall are like paint by numbers.

Let's say he wanted a opaque red.

He wouldn't say opaque red, it would say K83.

And when they start barking out those colors, the numbers, you have to know them.

You have to memorize them all.

I just wanna see the color combination.

And then, one second.

When I first did the this project for the Tacoma Museum of Art, I made forward trees and everything was cracking.

I couldn't figure out why it was cracking.

And so I had to test each color over and over, singly by itself.

It was one color that was ruining my whole thing, and that was 161.

So I had to remove it and then I could start again working.

So I learned my lesson.

Through this process, I can figure out any problems.

(glass banging) When 2020 happened, nobody wanted to blow glass because you put your mouth on the pipe.

So during that time, the shop slowed down, that the shop rentals slowed down, and then my husband passed away and I just couldn't shut off the furnace so I just let it go for like a year.

I only had enough energy to go into the shop for maybe a couple hours and then I wouldn't come back to the shop for a couple of days.

The first time in my life I couldn't do it.

(gentle music) But now I'm getting a lot better and I'm eating more and I have more energy so.

Basically I just want the shop for me now so that I can go down and quietly think.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) We all have a gift of some sort.

One of my gifts is that I make things.

I look at things, I question how they're made.

I always use a little something that I learn from something completely different in and put it in my glass, naturally curious, and never tell me you can't do something because then I'm gonna try to do it.

(laughs) I deal with a lot of different types of people to make my work.

So I have a metal guy that helps me make the armatures for the trees and some of the plants that I make.

And I always have to work with a structural engineer before I can put any of my trees up in any public space.

The part that I love most is it has a lot of frost and ice on it, so it gives me a kind of a cold feeling when I'm looking at it and feels like winter.

(upbeat music) So I just played around with a clear crystal glass on top of color and I've been playing with this shop for over 30 years, and you just have to keep testing to see if it's compatible.

And sometimes colors, two colors together, will fight each other.

So you'll find that out during the testing or they might react and create a beautiful pattern.

And if you play around with it enough, you'll find that sometimes the two colors fighting each other makes a beautiful pattern, a spider-webby pattern.

And so I play a lot around with colors that react to each other.

My whole thing is to capture the essence of whatever I'm studying that I wanna make.

It doesn't have to look true to life, it doesn't have to be a scientific study.

It's just my vision of what I see and how I interpret what I'm seeing.

(upbeat music) The community has become more diverse since I started building glass 30 years ago.

First of all, there were no women and no black women at all.

If I was number one or number two assistant to somebody else, my job as an assistant is to take instruction from whomever I'm working for.

The hard part is as an African American woman, be the gaffer, some men don't want to take instructions from me.

And that happened to me quite a bit.

When I was doing production work and I'd have to go over and get some guy to tell this other guy what I'd just been trying to tell him all day, and I'm losing money so I say, "Could you please tell him da da da da?"

And then he tells 'em right in front of me, "Da da da da da."

And then he'll listen.

(laughs) That is just the nature of things.

Some men find it very, very hard to take instruction from women.

But not anymore, they just listen to me.

(laughs) (upbeat music)