Hands of the Maker II : Collaborations

RHINO Contemporary Crafts Company and the International Society of Glass Beadmakers (ISGB) present a show in New Orleans during their annual conference, The Gathering.

"In this exhibition, the artistic focus will be on the exploration of the cooperative hands that contribute to a successful collaboration.

As artists, we each struggle to create a finished piece that expresses our vision and that in some way, subtle or bold, bears our signature. As we remarked in the description of the first Hands show, makers truly leave a piece of themselves in everything they create.

In this ISGB juried exhibition, our focus is on the artists’ hands and their breathtaking capabilities. The hands are everything. They help bring a story to life, capture a moment in time, and evoke the spirit of the creative process. Hands perform mundane tasks like tying shoes, they complete gestures, and they speak through our handwriting. As we age, our hands begin to tell the story of our life’s work and our creative calling, and like our work, they change over the course of time. 

Collaboration is the act of working with someone else to produce or create something. At the furnace, glass artists collaborate seamlessly to producea single finished piece. But many other glass collaborations are at a physical distance and not close in time. Still, in a successful collaboration the hands of each maker contribute to a final item that is a whole greater than the sum of its parts. If it is true that makers leave their mark, a successful

Collaboration shows the mark of a team, the ultimate makers’ mark achieved only through the synergy of disparate efforts and not easily identifiable as a signature of either participant."