It took Grace Wardlaw a yr and a half to look at the music video for Lo Vas A Olvidar, the Euphoria-premiering collaboration between Rosalía and Billie Eilish. Eventually, Wardlaw added hers to the 68 million views on YouTube, seeing for the primary time two of music’s most famous women adorned together with her hand-blown glass creations on their fingertips. Once I query her hesitance, the Canada-based artist says she’s undecided what held her back. “Perhaps I even have impostor syndrome. Like, that’s an excessive amount of. That’s too crazy,” she posits. It wasn’t until she hit play that Wardlaw realised the pieces were essentially the star of the video. “It’s a black room and just these two bodies with these illuminated nails,” she says. “It’s really beautiful.” 

Glass is having a significant moment in the style industry without delay: Latest York-based designer Maryam Nassir Zadeh recently released a jewelry line dedicated to the fabric and over on TikTok the girlies have been sporting Y2K-inspired pendants by Brooke Callahan. Earlier this yr, Coperni, in collaboration with Latest York-based glassware brand Heven, created a glass version of its original swipe handbag that, after being seen on the likes of Doja Cat and Kylie Jenner, quickly went viral.

Wardlaw’s introduction to glass got here at an early age when her parents took her to “one in all those weird pioneer villages” that happened to have a glass-blowing studio. There, she became mesmerised by the method. “I used to be very entranced by it. I remember watching the fireplace and the molten glass and considering, “that is so beautiful.’” After her initial stint studying art at school, her practice fell by the wayside as she travelled. Eventually, Wardlaw made her way home, teaming up together with her friend, artist Claire Anderson, to heal trauma by creating the glass sex toy business, Peace Lily Toys. Their pieces are so exquisite, they double as ornaments when not in use – and, though Instagram keeps removing the image of this toy being demonstrated in its night mode, they’ve even made a variety of butt plugs that double as flower vases. 

Since Wardlaw began collaborating with Los Angeles-based nail artist Sojin Oh, creating bespoke glass pieces that Oh will place on the fingers of Rosalía and Eilish and Lil Nas X, Grimes, Bjork, and Arca, her approach to her glass-blowing practice has expanded. She still creates with the identical intention, but has begun focusing more on creating wearable sculptures, similar to lashes, delicate face adornments, choker necklaces and thorn crowns inspired by Alexander McQueen’s Autumn/Winter 1996 runway. Mid-pandemic, long before Coperni’s handbags appeared on the red carpet, Wardlaw posted a photograph of a mini chilli pepper heel that, when enlarged, wouldn’t be amiss on Jonathan Anderson’s Loewe runway. 

Below, we speak to Wardlaw about her creative process, her favourite things to make from glass, and the intense way she proves that no, glass sex toys won’t break inside you.

You fell in love with glass from an early age, what was the method like of moving away from it after which coming back?

Grace Wardlaw: I used to be pretty young after I discovered glass as an art form. I did a couple of projects on it at highschool, before realising there was a course at my city’s college. But after that, I form of stopped for some time. Glass might be quite inaccessible as a medium and I used to be moving around rather a lot. I might still make work and used lots of silicone and rubber during this time, which I might cut up and stitch back together after shopping at toy stores and the toy district in downtown LA. Then in 2018, I got a residency at Sheridan College – where I originally studied glass – which reintroduced me to it. I devised a plan to return to high school to learn the newly introduced digitised elements, like 3D printing and 3D rendering, which is what I’m doing now. Currently, I’m learning easy methods to render these orchid sculptures I’ve been working on.

In 2020, you began making glass sex toys with one other artist, Claire Anderson. Are you able to tell me a bit about how this got here about and what the means of making these pieces is like? 

Grace Wardlaw: I had just moved back from Latest York and Claire and I had each just passed through big breakups. For me, Peace Lily Toys has this layer of healing together since it was really a tough time for us each. We selected the peace lily and flowers normally as an idea and a jump-off for inspiration and we went from there, developing products and designs. I used to be really considering collaborations with artists, so I started reaching out to people I like. We’ve since worked with the likes of Sacred Sadism, who’s really amazing, and Sua Yoo, one other incredible artist. We’re attempting to keep it open as an art project and a business, but in addition this thing that brings us joy and keeps our creativity alive.

I checked out your steadily asked questions on the positioning and the highest one is will it break… 

Grace Wardlaw: …We get that rather a lot. But our punchline mainly is making these videos where we run them over with cars and so they survive. So we’re like your body, your soft tissue, you’re not going to interrupt this toy.

Are you able to tell me a bit in regards to the large glass disco penis you made as your first piece out of glass-blowing college? 

Grace Wardlaw: Oh my god, yeah. It’s here now in my house. That was the very first thing that I made after I left school. And I don’t know, I just was like, ‘I don’t know if that is art or not,’ but I didn’t care in any respect. I shipped it off to a sex store in Vancouver where it lived for some time and it actually fell from the ceiling and cracked in half. It’s now back here and has type of grow to be the showpiece for Peace Lily Toys. We brought it to this sex expo in Toronto and it was successful.

What’s your creative process like? 

Grace Wardlaw: Regardless that I would categorise certain pieces of it, lots of my work overlaps and most of it starts from nature. Even the sex toy business, which is centred across the peace lily flower: flowers visually represent each genitalia and reproductive systems. They’re literally sex organs. I also prefer to embed human qualities into flowers and plants as a option to have a look at life and death, which is a philosophy I’ve been living by for a very long time now. 

You’re employed rather a lot with Sojin Oh. How does that collaboration work? 

Grace Wardlaw: Sojin and I are friends from after I lived in L.A. and as soon as she began making nails, I knew we must always collaborate. It may need taken a minute before that really began, but once it did, it was very easy. Sojin has an analogous creative process and in a way, working together has deepened that connection for me when it comes to ranging from nature as inspiration. She’s going to send me images of things she thinks are fascinating and delightful, like fungi and sea creatures, after which I would try to duplicate it with glass on this tiny scale. Batch by batch, we’ve grown together and have grow to be more intentional. We’re doing full sets now, like, okay Grimes wants a dagger set, so we go off and make that. Sojin obviously just smashes it. It’s like magic. I sit in my little country studio in Canada and make things after which they find yourself in LA on these people. It’s pretty overwhelming.

What are your favourite things to make with glass? 

Grace Wardlaw: A few of my favourite days without delay are after I determine I’m going to do a glance and sit with my glass torch in front of a mirror and play. These pieces are so thin that they cool down really fast, so I can bend a shape and fit it to my face along a certain area. And if it doesn’t work, just re-bend it. I’m at college without delay, so there are huge facilities at my disposal and I get to play rather a lot. I’ve been making these puddle pieces where I literally just put glass in a kiln and let it melt out right into a puddle. Those are pretty satisfying.

What piece or project are you most pleased with?

Grace Wardlaw: I’ve made lots of things, but I like pieces which can be random and just come to me. The disco ball is an amazing example of that. Or my sphynx cat mask, which I made after I was attempting to construct a form of weird fetish character. The piece with Sua [Yoo], which is a black claw dildo, is certainly one in all my favourites lately.

What’s next?

Grace Wardlaw: At once, I’m making a body of labor that’s inspired by orchids. I’m also working more with wearables. I’d done wearable things before with silicone, but my collaboration with Sojin opened my mind to with the ability to try this type of thing with confidence and feel prefer it’s art, too. It took me a second, but after I brought glass to my face, that was form of a moment for me. I’m experimenting now with making the glass the element that’s allowed to simply sit on the skin, or making it look as if it’s coming out of the skin. The important thing after I take into consideration fashion or style pieces is that they’re these extensions of the body or this tech that you simply wear that could be a a part of you. I even have visions for rather more of that.