Pilchuck Residency Recap: Botanical Printmaking with Glass
Session 1, 2025 | Instructor: Nikki Jaborra-Barber
I recently had the privilege of attending the 2025 Pilchuck Glass School Session 1 workshop, Botanical Printmaking with Glass, led by Seattle-based printmaker and artist Nikki Jaborra-Barber. This immersive workshop explored vitreography—a printmaking process using glass as a matrix—through the lens of the Pacific Northwest’s natural environment. As the course description notes, we learned to create “vitreograph plates to be sent through a press and printed on printmaking paper,” resulting in a portfolio of hand-inked, fine art prints and a new way of conceptualizing glass as a medium for mark-making.
Deep Studio Practice and Interdisciplinary Exploration
During the 8-day residency, I worked 10–16 hours per day in the studio, fully immersing myself in both traditional and experimental approaches to glass, printmaking, and digital media. The intensity of the workshop allowed me to push my creative boundaries, experiment with hybrid workflows, and expand the ways I merge digital design, illustration, and hands-on artmaking techniques.
As both an artist and an educator, this experience was transformative. It allowed me to explore how glass can act as both a conceptual and physical interface between digital design and analog processes—insights I plan to bring directly into my classrooms and curriculum.
Project 1: Slug & Dandelion Pin-Ups (Traditional Vitreography)
The first project I completed focused on traditional vitreographic methods. Vitreography—vitreo (glass) + graph (drawing)—uses 3/8" float glass as the print plate. Unlike metal or stone, glass offers the unique ability to combine both intaglio (etched) and relief (surface) printing techniques on a single plate. It also allows for blind embossing—printing without ink to create subtle, tactile impressions in the paper.
For this project, I drew inspiration from the local flora and fauna along Pilchuck’s trails, particularly slugs and dandelions. I began reflecting on the symbolic and cultural parallels between weeds, pests, and fatness—especially in femme bodies within queer spaces. Like the dandelion or slug, fatness is often framed as undesirable, abject, or out of place. This led me to design two "fat femme" pin-up figures: one with a dandelion head and one with a slug head.
These figures became the basis for a series of prints using both intaglio and relief inking techniques. I introduced additional layers of meaning and texture using colored chine-collé overlays. The process required patience and iteration—but the results were both technically rich and conceptually satisfying.
Project 2: Dandelion Life Cycle Animation (Experimental Vitreography + Digital Media)
My second project took a more experimental approach, combining vitreographic techniques with digital animation and stop motion. I wanted to explore the metaphorical resonance of the dandelion—its transformation across stages of life as a symbol of healing, growth, and change. I was particularly struck by the quote:
“The dandelion is the only flower that gets to be the sun, the moon, and the stars in the same lifetime.”
I hand-drew the dandelion life cycle digitally using a Wacom tablet and Adobe Photoshop, then vectorized the illustrations in Illustrator. From there, I cut 16 vinyl frames using a plotter and adhered them to 16 hand-cut glass plates, each 4”x3.5”. The plates were deeply sandblasted to create animated frames that could also function as embossing plates.
This process involved extensive coldworking: cutting, seaming, and cleaning glass; affixing vinyl; and sandblasting detail into each plate. The final 23-second stop motion animation was photographed frame by frame. The project took over 30 hours and beautifully embodied a digital–analog–digital workflow.
Impacts on My Art Practice
This residency expanded how I think about interdisciplinary media. As someone working at the intersection of glass, digital design, and storytelling, I now see even more potential for blending traditional processes like vitreography with modern tools like digital illustration, CNC cutting, and stop motion. The embodied labor of glasswork added a new layer of materiality to my conceptual practice, especially around themes of body, identity, and transformation.
These two projects—one rooted in traditional printmaking and the other in digital animation—both reinforced my belief that form and meaning are deeply intertwined. They also affirmed my commitment to pushing glass beyond its decorative or utilitarian associations into the realm of contemporary conceptual art.
Impacts on My Teaching Practice
This experience has already begun to influence how I approach teaching digital media. In my Digital Illustration and 3D Modeling courses, I often encourage students to blend physical and digital workflows. Having now gone through a start-to-finish project that moves fluidly across those boundaries, I can bring back concrete examples, techniques, and process documentation to share with my students.
Key takeaways I plan to incorporate into future teaching:
Expanded definitions of media: Introducing students to how traditional methods like printmaking can be integrated with digital tools like vinyl cutters, vector graphics, and animation software.
Physical/digital workflow strategies: Demonstrating hybrid project pipelines that start digitally, move into the physical world, and return to digital for presentation or motion design.
Material thinking in design: Encouraging students to think about texture, dimension, and tactility—even in digital projects—by referencing blind embossing, intaglio textures, and other analog mark-making techniques.
These practices not only enrich technical learning, but also support equity and access by allowing students to explore a wide range of materials and methods that meet different learning styles and cultural aesthetics.
Looking Ahead: Translation, Transformation, and New Dimensions
Later this summer, I will return to Pilchuck Glass School for a second residency to participate in the workshop Glass and Print: Translation and Transformation, taught by internationally recognized artist and educator Jeffrey Sarmiento. This session marks a significant shift in focus from my first residency.
While Botanical Printmaking with Glass centered on traditional vitreography and analog mark-making—emphasizing hands-on intaglio and relief processes with 2D print outcomes—this second workshop explores glass as a site of translation between image, object, and space. Sarmiento’s approach emphasizes kilnforming, digital fabrication, and layered glass processes as tools to reimagine how prints and images can occupy dimensional, sculptural, and architectural space.
Unlike the first workshop, which primarily involved working flat with float glass and a press, this upcoming residency will allow me to:
Translate digital imagery into sculptural form using tools like laser engraving, waterjet cutting, and CNC routing;
Experiment with screenprinting, photo decals, and multi-layered imagery embedded inside or on the surface of blown and fused glass;
Engage deeply with architectural and spatial concepts—thinking about glass as a lens, a container, or even a narrative surface that can exist in three dimensions;
Further develop techniques for embedding meaning through materiality, such as layering image, text, and opacity to convey memory, identity, and distortion.
As a digital design educator, this workshop will be invaluable in helping me expand my understanding of how 2D design and print techniques can evolve into 3D visual storytelling. I plan to bring back not only technical skills and material samples, but also new frameworks for helping students explore dimensionality, transparency, and translation—concepts that apply across digital design, illustration, and motion graphics.
I'm especially excited to explore ways to introduce students to fabrication tools like laser cutters and CNC routers as part of their design vocabulary, and to model interdisciplinary workflows that move beyond the screen and into the world of physical, tactile form.
This next chapter at Pilchuck will be a powerful complement to my first residency—pushing me further into a hybrid practice that merges digital, analog, spatial, and narrative elements. I am grateful for the chance to continue evolving my own work while developing rich, real-world experiences to bring back into the classroom.
