Stacey Waldfogel

Stacey Waldfogel is a free-spirited Colorado native with a passion for reviving old-world craftsmanship to create art that reflects modern life and her love of nature. Stacey sees the glass as the most versatile art medium—beyond creating intricate stained glass panels, she has worked with glass fusing, etching, painting, sgraffito, and sculpture. Each piece of glass has its own personality, and Stacey loves pulling colors and textures together to capture a moment in time, in a work of art that is both fragile and strong. Beginning as a self-taught enthusiast, Stacey has apprenticed with local glass artists and now works as a stained glass artist at Dimensions in Art Glass LLC.

Inside the kaleidoscope: western wabi-sabi reflections. When molten glass is hand mixed and fed through rollers, the freeform ends (often called heads & tails) are cut off to leave a rectangular sheet of glass. The remaining heads & tails are commonly thrown out or chipped and re-melted, as they are considered unusable for conventional stained glass art. Always ecological in her approach to life and art, in her newest series Stacey Waldfogel rescues heads & tails from the scrap pile and creates art that celebrates their unique pooled and swirling colors, textures, and organic natural edges that demand a mirror-image open space.

Incorporating organic shapes and patterns in agate slices or mouth-blown rondels, Stacey designs each composition to maintain the integrity of the patterns in the head glass. The color mix, wrinkles, folds, and smooth edges are different for each head or tail, resulting in myriad unique combinations that, more than anything else, resemble extreme macro views of kaleidoscopic images. The irregular shapes and open spaces in each piece calls to mind the Japanese wabi-sabi aesthetic of beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. These pieces are in turn quirky, elegant, and fresh, and each individual piece invites contemplation, introspection, and celebration of the ecology of acceptance.