Vermont Glass Guild

I'm often asked how one starts out on this path. I was lucky enough to be born into a glass-making family. My grandfather worked for forty-two years as an industrial glassworker at General Electric in Cleveland, Ohio. His experience and technical knowledge helped my father, Thomas Kekic, help build the first glass studio and program for R.I.T. in Rochester, NY. Growing up during the early studio art glass movement in America, I was surrounded by hand-made objects and people who worked hard at developing their craft, using raw, natural materials and great effort to bring their creative ideas to life. After my father passed away, I had all but forgotten his glassmaking. So it was only later in my life, at nineteen, that I fully realized my legacy while attending a beginning glassblowing class at Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, where my father had been some twenty years before. Penland for me came to be a place for discovering my own creative resources. It was there that I developed a new relationship with glass, one where I began to rediscover the value of finely crafted hand-made things, not only as useful and beautiful objects but valuable for the satisfaction one gets in making them. These objects are not only important as expressions of who we are but there’s great importance in experiencing the creative process that brings them to life. Spending time making things that are either beautiful or useful, encourages us to reach into some of what makes us most human. There is greatness in the life of ideas and creativity these processes can generate. It is in this tradition that I believe making, using and appreciating these glass objects brings a richness to our lives that is both unique and precious.