Collaborative glass sculptors Jenny Pohlman and Sabrina Knowles from Seattle, Wash., are in Emporia this week to work with glass blowing students and demonstrate their work at the guild’s annual Glass Blowout on Saturday in the Art Annex.

“While we’re working, we’re explaining to the students some basic fundamentals of manipulating the material and how some of those fundamentals might apply to their own work that they’ve been doing,” Pohlman said.

The blowout begins at 9 a.m. with glass blowing demonstrations, then a potluck barbecue at 5 p.m. and ends with a glass auction at 7 p.m. Pieces from students, faculty, guest artists Jenny Pohlman and Sabrina Knowles and guest artists from previous years will be available at the auction and bluegrass band The Skirts are playing at the barbecue. Proceeds from the auction go to the Glass Guild’s supplies, scholarships, visiting artists and for the guild to attend the glass art society conference in June. The event is free to anyone who wishes to attend.

“(The auction) allows us to bring in artists like Jenny and Sabrina and it also allows us to upgrade our equipment and just fix things up around the shop that we normally wouldn’t be funded for through the school,” said Kristin Elliot, senior glass blowing major and president of the Glass Guild.

Associate professor of glass Patrick Martin said the blowout is the guild’s open house. He said current and previous students and their families as well as artists from around the state and artists who were once students at ESU attend every year. Martin said it was called the “Blowathon” before he started working at ESU 10 years ago.

“It’s been going on before I got here. We changed it a little bit to more of a visiting artist demonstration thing, but it’s still our open house,” Martin said.

Pohlman and Knowles said they have been working with one another for 18 years. Martin said the guild tries to bring in a working professional artist every year and this year the students get to see how a team works together. He said a lot of their work is mixed media.

“You’ll see how a team makes their work or and also how one will do one certain aspect of the process while the other will do other aspects and that’s how they work together,” Martin said.

Knowles said that though she and Pohlman have opposing aesthetics when it comes to their work, the message of it is unified. She said they both do glass blowing, both design and both do some metal working but Pohlman does the majority of the metal work.

“We found that the core of our philosophies about life and humanity and people just run totally parallel, so our work sort of brings our different aesthetics, but the vibration, kind of the soul of the work is unified,” Knowles said.

Elliot said Knowles and Pohlmanare also there to critique student work and show them techniques they might have never seen before. She said it allows them to see what life might be like when they graduate and possibly become professional artists themselves.

“They live in Seattle, which is like the glass place to be, and so they’re around all the professionals up there, so tips that they see that we will never see in Kansas they bring to us which is a big opportunity of the blowout,” Elliot said.

Knowles said she and Pohlman are enjoying working with the guild and feel like they’re all old friends. She said she wants to help students develop work ethics and stay true to what they want to do.

“We want to help them develop a nice work ethic and to respect one another in the hot shop and to recognize and appreciate that it is a team game so to speak and also that the limits are limitless,” Knowles said.

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