By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
Hannah Bowlus’ lamps have been lighting the way into the 2022 Undergraduate Exhibition in the School of Art Galleries on the BGSU campus.
The six lamps brighten the entryway into the Bryan Gallery. The prominent placement turned out to be prescient – Bowlus’ Lamp Series won the Medici Circle Best of Show Award at the exhibit which closes today.
Bowlus is a junior who expects to graduate with a liberal studies degree. She has lots of academic interests – math, astronomy, the behavioral sciences as well as studio art. “I am kind of all over the place,” she said. “I feel like every class I’m in is feeding into this.”
Her studies in the social sciences inform her desire to understand why and how people enjoy art. “Art speaks to so many different people. People can see the same piece, but because of their backgrounds, because of the environment they grew up in, they respond to it in so many different ways.”
She’s fascinated by how viewers respond to her lamps in particular. With this body of work, she steps away “from conceptual and abstract meaning to straight design,” Bowlus said.
“I want to focus on things where it’s just pleasing to look at purely for aesthetics. I’m not trying to represent any abstract or conceptual meaning. I’m just exploring what people enjoy because it’s nice to look at.”
The lamp series is also showing her how she can continue making art in the future. “I would love to take this further so lots of people could actually enjoy these pieces their home,” adding “I’m not sure what that looks like.”
The lamps on display are her first work employing lighting and are not for sale. They are prototypes. “They are not the best quality of work I can produce,” Bowlus said. “This was just a lot of testing and starting. There are a lot of things I want to change in the design to make them better in a household.”
This semester she’s developing molds to make the process more efficient. “These took a lot of time and I want to get paid for my time, but I want them to be affordable to people. Molds help in that process.”
Bowlus is also learning which of the designs might lend themselves better to further development.
The relationship of glass to light drew her to the medium. The lamps show how light can be manipulated. She uses layers of glass to play with how the colors interact with each other. She explores how the colors change when the light is on or off as well as “the way you can bend light through the medium itself.”
She looks at the lamps as something practical “not just something that sits on a pedestal.”
“This is something you can have in your house that changes the atmosphere of the room while also being a really cool sculptural piece of art.”
Bowlus has been interested in art since childhood. When she was very young she wouldn’t let her father leave for work until she had finished a drawing for him to take.
Her early life was spent in Delaware, Ohio. About 10 years ago, her family relocated to Bowling Green.
She graduated from Bowling Green High School and benefited from the school’s art program. “You have access to so many different things, 2D, metals, ceramics” that are not available at other schools, she said.
Her main focus was on 2D work, though she did experiment with ceramics. That experience with drawing plays an important part in her practice as she fills her sketchbooks with designs that she then turns into 3D objects.
She doesn’t remember why she decided to take introduction to glass when she arrived on campus. But she knows she’s found a home working with Joel O’Dorisio, who is guiding her advanced studies, Allie Hoag, who directs the glass program, glass technician Tim Spurchise, and “so many others that I’m learning from every day.”
That includes her fellow students. “We’re at such a really good place. We’re all on the same playing field trying to learn this ridiculous medium that is glass.”
This semester she is a teaching assistant, and she also has a position as a glass technician at the Toledo Museum of Art’s Glass Pavilion. This is helping her bring her future in glass into better focus, and showing her how having a studio can give her access to the technology she’ll need to further develop her art.
Still Bowlus expects her intellectual curiosity will persist. “I see myself as having a lot of different things going on.”
