Ornament is the leading magazine celebrating wearable art. Explore jewelry, fashion, beads; contemporary, ancient and ethnographic.
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72 ORNAMENT 35.5.2012 Gregg Burgard glass arts Robert K. Liu N ot until well into the twentieth century did the names of ot until w the twentiet did the na craftspeople become associated with their products. Anonymity had been the norm, as is the case now with most ethnographic craftmakers. Even today, such a situation holds with many jewelry designers, whose labor is credited to the firms or clients they work with or for. This is the situation faced by Gregg Burgard, who has been a jeweler since he was sixteen and has been known for many years to those in the glass bead and ornament community for his ingenious findings for displaying beads and molds for wearable glass. He first learned lampworking from Lewis Wilson, but eventually switched to kiln-worked glass as he wanted to work without influence from other glass artists. Although he studied mechanical engineering and art at New Mexico State University, he has worked in the jewelry industry his entire life. His day job involved every aspect of producing jewelry, from design to manufacture, especially with regard to the sculpting of masters and their casting for manufacturing. craftspeople become associated w While he now sculpts his original models in hard green wax, his skills were honed from childhood, when he worked in clay, making entire dioramas on a long kitchen counter his father attached to one wall of his bedroom. This large surface became the setting for dioramas with animals, trees or the Old West. At summer jobs during the 1970s, he made Southwest jewelry with Native American jewelers, who kindly coached and mentored him. Burgard remembers taking the bus as a teenager to Rio Grande to buy tools and supplies for the jewelry workshop he set up in the garage with a friend. Decades later, he has just joined that well-known Albuquerque jewelry supply firm, working in the sales and tech support section for rapid prototyping (RP) and CAD. After leaving Shube Manufacturing, where he was for almost two decades the director of product development, Burgard realized that this new technology was the future. He started learning the software necessary for CAD and RP; and his training continues at Rio Grande. Like many of the staff there, they have interests in jewelry beyond work and they bring these skills and desires to their jobs at Rio Grande. From after dinner to midnight, Burgard works on his pâte de verre pendants, which have taken him thirteen years and over two hundred experiments to develop to the point where this exceedingly difficult process is reliable enough, with the failure rate for castings falling below thirty percent. Even though his major muse Lalique used this process, it was done very sparingly, due to its difficulty. While others in art glass, like Matt Bezak (see Ornament Vol. 26, No. 2), also make pâte de verre jewelry, Burgard's are done in a two-part mold, permitting a fully dimensional figure that does not require mounting in metal for use and usually incorporate bezel- set precious stones or pearls. In addition, his finished castings are sent to a California vendor to be coated in dichroic glass, lending a magical iridescence to these sculptures. A number of galleries in Arizona and Hawaii carry his work and Burgard has won top awards at the 2010 and 2012 Glass Expos in Las Vegas, Nevada; these venues have drawn much attention to his current glass pendants, part of the Sea Life Group. His pendants are strung in various ways, sometimes on pearls by the galleries. Along with building a new, larger studio at home, he is devoting more attention to design, increased size and elaborateness in his pâte de verre ornaments. Burgard regards his current glass casts as a starting point. He would like to market the new work at select retail shows; Burgard likes the complete cycle of interaction with his customers, which both provides validation and that warm feeling he is affecting them in a positive way with his glass art. MERMAID PENDANT of pâte de verre, coated with dichroic; 5.4 centimeters high, set with a freshwater pearl. All miniature glass sculptures have an integral loop. Photographs by Robert K. Liu/Ornament. GREGG BURGARD at the bench in his Albuquerque studio, touching up a pâte de verre pendant with a bur. Other casts are on the bench. Studio photographs courtesy of the artist.