Artist Statement
Cia Friedrich, Glass ‘Cia Shells’

     Even though Cia Friedrich left San Francisco for the New Mexican desert at age 8, she never forgot the ocean. “I can picture it in my mind, the coastline and the tide pools,” says the Forty year old artist who lives and works in Santa Fe. “On the Point Reyes Peninsula, we’d collect tiny shells and sand dollars down by Bolinas.”
While studying fine art in the late 1980s at California College of Art & Crafts, (now California College of the Arts), Cia spent her summers at Santa Fe’s Tesuque Glass Works as an apprentice; she returned to the studio as a professional artist in 2003. Her work is influenced by numerous notable  glass artists from around the world, and the artists of the Pilchuck School of Glass, founded in 1971 by internationally renown glass artist Dale Chihuly. Pino Signoretto, an Itallian glass sculpting maestro, from Maurano expanded Cias ambition enormously.
But it was a friend’s shell collection, bequeathed to Cia after his death, that inspired her the most. “People started giving me more shells,” she says, adding that after sculpting an initial vase shape into a shell form for the last four years, she’s still fascinated by process.
For Cia, each shell becomes a journey of color. “The colors respond differently with each other and I play with these new reactions, different colors have different chemical reactions together,” she says. “Part of the fun is seeing how two or three colors react, creating new colors and textures.”
The spontaneity of shape also moves her artistically and spiritually. “The movements I make to make a shell fit so well with molten glass,” she says. “The shape grows as I move and twist it around, it forms its own life and definition.”
“If I knew how the shapes and colors would turn out,” she says, “I would quit making them. What I love is the glass taking on a life of its own.”
Cia' donates her blown-glass shells to several annual auctions, including Santa Fe’s Little Earth School and Philadelphia’s National Liberty Museum. For more information, contact Glass Art at The National Liberty Museum