Bio
Jessica Theobald is a glass artist working primarily with lampworking alongside glassblowing. She is currently in her third year studying Design Crafts at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David in Swansea.
Her practice centres on combining glass with mixed media such as metal and fabric, drawn to the tension between fragile and industrial materials and how they sit together.
Colour is a key part of her work and something she returns to constantly, testing how it behaves through light, layering and different contexts, and how it can shift the emotional feel of a piece.
Influenced by her location and surroundings, her work often connects to the human body and to nature, sometimes exploring the space where the two begin to overlap.
Her process is led by experimentation and making, pushing materials to their limits and allowing ideas to develop through working. The pieces she creates aim to spark curiosity and invite closer looking, often holding an emerging sense of narrative rather than a fixed meaning.
Artist Statement
I work primarily with glass, using lampworking as my main process while increasingly incorporating glassblowing within the limits of the facilities available to me. I’m drawn to the precision and intensity of working with hot glass and the way both processes allow me to build detailed, expressive forms while responding physically to the material in the moment.
Alongside glass I bring in mixed media such as metal, found objects and natural materials to explore contrast and material tension. I’m particularly interested in the friction between the fragile and the industrial and how these opposing qualities can sit together to create something that feels slightly unresolved.
Colour continues to drive my practice. I become absorbed in testing how it behaves through light, layering and shifting contexts, especially within glass where it can change so dramatically. I’m interested in its emotional weight and how subtle shifts in tone or transparency can alter the atmosphere of a piece.
My environment and location play an important role in shaping my work, influencing both the materials I use and the direction my ideas take. There is often a connection to the human body or to nature within my work and I’m increasingly interested in the space where those two overlap, where forms can feel both internal and external at the same time.
Now in my third year my process has become more intuitive and responsive. Story remains at the core of what I make but it often emerges through making rather than being fully formed at the start. I use the physical act of working, melting shaping and breathing, as a way of thinking, with breath becoming a material in itself, particularly through glassblowing. It becomes part of how the work is formed, controlled and sometimes disrupted, allowing a narrative or emotional thread to develop as the piece evolves.
Experimentation continues to be essential to my practice. I push materials to behave in unfamiliar ways, often working at the edge of what they can handle. I’m interested in moments where things resist or fail, where materials push back, as these points of tension often lead to unexpected outcomes.
I rarely begin with a fixed outcome. Instead I aim to create work that invites curiosity, pieces that draw people in and encourage them to look closer, question and form their own emotional or narrative connections, with an emerging story that reveals itself through experience rather than explanation.