Barbara Bernstein

After a career spent writing computer software, I moved to a farmhouse in upstate New York where I have the time and space to devote myself to my lifelong desire to make art. I renovated my barn and set up a kilnforming studio in 2001. I have studied glass-making at the Studio at the Corning Museum of Glass, Urban Glass, Pittsburgh Glass, and at the Pilchuck Glass School. In 2010, Schiffer Press included my cast glass sculptures in the anthology “Creative Glass”.

My sculptures celebrate the diversity of the human form using glass. My sculptures are often abstract organic forms depicting the curves of the female body. These curves are like the rolling hills of the Southern Tier, and some of my pieces depict the body as landscape. I pay particular attention to the lines made by the boundaries of the body as well as its masses. Glass is hard and the human form is soft; the body is warm and glass is cold. It might seem paradoxical to use glass to make art about people; but I like paradoxes.