Pilchuck Session 3 RECAP: Glass and Print
June 20 – July 1, 2025
Instructor: Jeffrey Sarmiento, TAs: Holly Grace, Josefina Muñoz Torres
This summer I was honored to attend a two-week workshop at Pilchuck Glass School that brought together artists working at the intersection of digital design, printmaking, and glass. Titled Translation and Transformation, the session was led by artist and researcher Jeffrey Sarmiento, with assistance from glass artists Holly Grace and Josefina Torres Muñoz.
The focus of the course was to explore how images—digital, hand-drawn, photographic, or symbolic—can be transferred into and onto glass using a range of techniques. The workshop emphasized experimentation, iteration, and failure as a tool for discovery—values I actively center in my own pedagogy as a professor of digital design and new media.
Over two weeks, we moved between digital and physical processes, engaging in screen printing with enamels and glass powders, vector design for stencil-based applications, waterjet cutting, enamel painting, resist-based sandblasting, and kilnforming. We not only worked with pre-made glass, but also made our own colored sheets by blowing, cutting, and slumping glass cylinders. Throughout, the challenge was to preserve image quality and narrative clarity while allowing the material itself—glass, heat, gravity—to transform those images.
For me, this workshop wasn’t just about skill-building—it was about connecting my conceptual practice, rooted in identity, diaspora, feminism, and trauma, with new material forms. I produced several works that explore the tension between the sacred and the profane, between traditional and digital media, and between inherited myths and contemporary survival.
Three pieces, in particular, emerged from this exploration:
✶ Palimpsest of the Profane and Pure
Fused and layered screenprinted glass, 2025
This piece explores the layered and often conflicting ways women’s bodies, identities, and cultural histories are represented and controlled. The term palimpsest refers to a surface—like a manuscript or wall—that’s been written over multiple times, where traces of the original still remain. In this work, that idea is translated into glass, where layered imagery melts, distorts, and overlaps—never fully disappearing, but constantly shifting.
The symbols embedded in the glass include:
The Sheela-na-Gig, a mythic female figure found carved into churches across Ireland and Britain. She’s shown pulling open her vulva—a gesture interpreted by some as fertility, others as protection or resistance.
The triskele, an ancient Celtic symbol of motion and cyclical change.
A uterus diagram and vulva illustration, representing bodily autonomy and the personal made political.
The claddagh, a traditional Irish symbol of love, loyalty, and friendship.
These images connect to my identity as an Irish-American woman raised Catholic, reckoning with the erasure of pagan feminine spirituality and the way Christianity has both absorbed and silenced these older symbols.
Glass is central to the meaning of this work—not just as a medium, but as a metaphor. Light passes through it. Images bend and blur. You can see what’s underneath, but never clearly. Like memory. Like history. Like identity.
The result is a single fused glass slab where sacred symbols, personal experiences, and cultural tensions collide—some distorted, some preserved, all still present.
✶ She Who Guards the Feed
Enamel-painted glass with digital video loop, 2025
This piece explores how digital culture—especially social media—has become a kind of modern altar. I painted a Sheela-na-Gig figure onto a panel of clear glass using traditional stained glass enamels. She’s rendered in my own illustration style, with bold lines and exaggerated features, and her vulva forms a literal portal in the glass. Behind that portal sits a phone, the screen visible only through the opening in her body. On the screen, a looping video scrolls endlessly through beauty routines, weight-loss ads, and fashion advice.
The Sheela-na-Gig has long been a figure of contradiction. In Celtic and Irish folklore, she’s often carved above the entrances to churches, pulling open her vulva as if to ward off evil. Some see her as grotesque, others as sacred. To me, she’s a guardian—a reminder that female power is often hidden in plain sight, misunderstood, or repurposed by systems of control.
In this work, she acts as both protector and portal. She stands between the viewer and the screen, asking us to consider what we’re letting into our bodies and minds. What are we worshiping now? What kinds of beauty, identity, or worth are being fed to us, and what happens when we consume them without question?
By combining traditional stained glass techniques with digital video, I wanted to hold space for that tension—the sacred and the profane, the ancient and the contemporary, the personal and the algorithmic. This piece is both a warning and a mirror.
✶ Altered Altar
Enamel-painted slumped glass with digital video loop, 2025
Altered Altar is a meditation on grief, survival, and the loss of spiritual inheritance. I painted this Sheela-na-Gig onto a large sheet of glass using traditional Reusche enamels—techniques often used in church windows—then slumped the glass over a narrow screen so that her body forms a kind of veil or draped curtain over the glowing display.
She’s screaming. Her mouth is open, her hair is full of snakes, and she’s pulling open her vulva in the gesture that defines her form across Irish and British churches. For me, she’s not just a symbol of protection or fertility—she’s a witness. A survivor. The snakes reference Medusa, another misunderstood and weaponized figure, but also Ireland’s pagan past. The saying that St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland is widely believed to be a metaphor for the violent erasure of pagan, earth-based spiritual practices, especially those centered on the feminine.
As an Irish-American woman raised Catholic, I carry a sense of diasporic disconnection—from land, language, ritual, and divine feminine power. And as a survivor of sexual violence, I see how patriarchal systems—religious, political, digital—continue to shape what we worship and what we erase.
The video loop beneath the glass includes fragments of digital imagery: religious iconography, flashes of violence, and the aesthetic noise of modern media. It’s a visual lament for what’s been lost—and what we’ve replaced it with.
This piece is an altar, but not to any one god. It’s an offering to those of us who scream, who remember, and who still seek the sacred in the wreckage.
Teaching Through Making: How Pilchuck Expands My Classroom and Community
This residency was more than a personal exploration—it was an opportunity to deepen how I teach, how I model creative risk, and how I support my students in Digital Design. At its core, this experience reinforced the importance of helping students move beyond the silo of the screen and reimagine what digital design can become when it leaves the confines of software and enters the physical world.
At Pilchuck, I was immersed in processes that blended digital tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and vector drawing with traditional techniques like screenprinting, kilnforming, and enamel painting. The tactile, physical, and unpredictable nature of these materials reminded me how important it is for students—especially in a digitally focused discipline—to understand that their ideas don’t have to end in a file format. They can hold their work in their hands. They can alter it. They can see their digital designs on objects in the real world.
This is something I want to bring directly back into my curriculum: assignments that challenge students to consider how their designs might live in physical space. I plan to build new project structures that ask students to create digital designs that are then translated into physical objects—through printmaking, vinyl cutting, laser engraving, or mixed media. These types of assignments foster critical thinking and design adaptability, and also invite collaboration with other departments and facilities on campus—like studio art and the makerspace.
But beyond tools and techniques, Pilchuck affirmed the deeper why behind my teaching practice. As a fat, queer, neurodivergent artist and trauma survivor, my work is grounded in identity. At Pilchuck, I pushed myself to explore themes of bodily autonomy, ancestral erasure, grief, and resilience using both ancient and contemporary symbols. I incorporated imagery like the Sheela-na-Gig, Medusa, the claddagh, and the triskele—not just as aesthetic references, but as portals into conversations about feminism, colonialism, spiritual loss, and cultural reclamation.
When I bring these pieces back into the classroom, I am modeling for my students—especially those who are Black, Brown, queer, disabled, first-gen, or otherwise marginalized—that their stories are worthy of being seen, studied, and materialized. I want my students to feel empowered to draw from their lived experiences, their cultural identities, and their personal griefs and joys when creating work. Digital design can do more than make things “look good”—it can be a vessel for voice, for truth, for transformation.
I’m also excited to share that some of the pieces I created at Pilchuck—Palimpsest of the Profane and Pure, and PNW Pinup Pests—will be included along with a few other of my works in the upcoming Pierce College Faculty Art Exhibition, running late July through early October at the Olympic South Gallery on our Fort Steilacoom campus. This exhibition is not only a chance for my colleagues and students to see the work firsthand, but also a space to begin cross-disciplinary conversations about what it means to make meaning—and how design, glass, technology, and identity can coalesce into powerful visual storytelling.
As both a professional artist and an educator, this experience has enriched my practice in ways I’m still unpacking. But more than anything, it’s expanded how I imagine possibility—for myself, my students, and our community.
