Glassblowing is an art that takes a team to create beautiful pieces at Water Street Glass Works, Jordan Rose and Lexi Ziebarth work together to make some amazing works.

My name is Jordan Rose and my position is studio tech and instructor at Water Street Glassworks.

Lexi if you can add a little bit of that orange to a scoop so I can make sure I cover the bottom I originally started here because I was just here all the time.

And then they're like, We should probably be paying you because you're here so often.

My name is Lexie Ziebarth position is kind of hard.

So I tech, I teach, I do a little bit of everything here, Paddle on, So Jordan and Lexi are glass partners.

You know, unlike most mediums, glassblowing requires a team, you know.

So anything that they're making, you know, requires at least another person.

I don't want to say like yin and yang, but they feed off each other.

Their personalities are just enough different where they're able to complement one another.

you see the personality differences where Jordan is, let's go, let's do it.

And Lexi is that's a great idea.

Let's think about how we're going to do it.

And so they are so great at feeding off each other and working together.

And their personalities are just both positive and great to be around.

we are able to instinctually know what the person's going to do next, where that person's going to move around the studio, are they going to need a colored foot?

Does it need to be two, three gathers and just how to kind of move around each other?

And, you know, there's almost a silent communication level that happens between really good partners.

And I think Lexi and I have accomplished that.

Well.

and flatten and flip flatten One more time I started with our T.G.I.

Friday classes at the time, they were just kind of like, Come in on Fridays, bring your own glass.

We might have a project for you to do, but, you know, you can kind of also do your own being kind of like a free studio.

and then I just started taking more advanced classes.

So we're like, Oh yeah, if you're going to teach this class, this is how you do it.

And then I took all of the classes we offered and I kind of had nowhere else to go but just to be here.

I actually taught Lexi previous to meeting her here at Krasl Arts Center.

I was a camp counselor there for, for a number of years.

So I've kind of watched Lexi grow up throughout the years.

I first encountered Lexi here at Water Street, I don't know, probably seven, eight years ago, and she was just such a creative kids.

I knew immediately that, you know, this was going to stick for her.

throughout middle school and high school.

I was in the fired up program for learning how to do all of like the booth work and talking to people and selling your own art and which was really fun.

And I stayed here more.

So I like learning how to do the kilns, run the kilns.

And then during fired up, I actually switched to being in the glassblowing studio.

That's where I learned how to do all the glassblowing.

And then again I just kind of hung around until they were like, Okay, this is how you do this.

This is how you do this.

You can talk now.

Yeah.

Lexi wears lots of hats.

She leads our Our Spark program, which is a volunteer based program in our fuzing studio.

She also helps teach the fired up program with me on Thursdays.

So, you know, having an alumni do that I think is more meaningful.

And as far as like the work that Lexi is making, she's doing a really cool thing where she's, you know, a ceramics major in college.

But she, you know, has this skill set that maybe not all ceramic majors have, right.

This experience over a long period of time with glass.

So she's blending these two mediums together and making some really compelling work.

It's fascinating to watch her just in the time that I've been here, watch her grow in her role, in her teaching role, and see the possibilities of what she's going to do with her educational background and her arts background.

So I went to College for Creative Studies on the other side of the state in midtown Detroit, CCS is one of the only schools in the state of Michigan that teaches glassblowing.

And so there was something about the fluidity of movement and the studio art dance as glass blowers call it, that you move around the studio that just was rhythmic and kind of enticing and kind of really draws you in to watch it.

So I spent some time watching it and then just quickly took a class and just fell head over heels for it.

So my first glassblowing job in that was actually at Cedar Point in Ohio.

they wanted and encouraged students and glassblowing to then come and teach glassblowing.

So I started there as doing production glass, which was very experimental.

We were pretty much given free reins on what type of things we wanted to design and make So I started there.

I spent a good summer there.

I went back to school, did a year of school.

The next year I spent a summer at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

while I was there, I worked with a couple of different visiting artists, but we did very traditional historic glassblowing.

Not only was I were you blowing in a true historic glass lens to do that, they moved to Henry Ford.

But then you were making the the history of it.

So I met Jordan here at Water Street Glassworks, I would say about 2018, and she was just graduating college around that time or about to graduate college.

so she took a different path than than you know, a lot of our students here where, you know, she was formally trained by a fantastic school in Detroit called CCS College for Creative Studies.

And so, you know, when I had the opportunity to hire her back here gather some of that wealth of knowledge that she learned in school and, you know, harness that for Water Street.

know, as far as glass you know, it's been a largely male dominated medium, It wasn't until the 1960s where the studio glass movement came to be that you started to see women in leadership roles in the studio.

when you go back to historic Italian Venetian glass blowers, there weren't really women on the island except for wives or daughters.

They were not allowed in the studio.

And so it's a lot of families that who have had girls and not boys.

The art has died just because it wasn't allowed.

Oh my gosh, I can't even begin to describe all of, like, my favorite art pieces that, like, people have contributed to male artists and they're not.

like, different manuscripts would be made by female artists, but they were not legally allowed to do that.

So then they would have to sell it under their dad's name and they never got the credit for it.

So I feel like there's definitely not a presence of women in art, but I feel like there always has been.

We just don't always recognize it.

I think the future of glass is women.

You know, I think that most innovation is coming from women nowadays in glass, and I think it's a really awesome thing.

Lexi and Jordan both have wonderful support systems.

They both have mothers who are involved at Water Street.

Both of their mothers volunteer here.

and they already are mentors to the students that we have here, I don't think that they realize yet what mentors they are.

But they they are because glassblowing is a dance and has so much free movement.

it really takes on emotion.

And I think that that really is emulated beautifully in glass that isn't necessarily emulated in other mediums.

you can pick up a glass like you drink out of a glass every day, but you don't realize, like all of the work that one has put in, like the amount of history that's behind it.

We work with the same tools that Egyptians worked with and people would never know that history if it wasn't for this place and places like it.

So I think it's really interesting to, like, come back to your roots almost and to have a a deeper understanding of this everyday objects.

It's kind of the same in ceramics with plates, but it's just this, this nice down to earth, like I made this with my own hands and it's functional and it's looks good and it's just so, it's so touching, I guess