BOUNTIFUL — As a child, Jodie McDougall remembers being fascinated by glass paperweights, wondering how a picture got inside the glass bubble.
“It was just one of those obscure things that I fell in love with. So I have no rhyme or reason for it,” she said. But little did she know that childhood fascination would be one of many little steps on her journey to becoming a world-renowned glass artist.
About 25 years ago, McDougall was a self-employed single mom having to get creative since money was scarce. If she wanted anything nice, she had to make it herself. She dreamed of having a stained glass Tiffany lamp, so she decided to make one.
“I made a koi fish, but I wanted interesting eyeballs. My friend said, ‘Why don’t you melt the glass?’ I’m like, ‘Oh, you can melt glass?’ So I got a torch and that was kind of it,” she said.
McDougall has been hooked ever since on the art of glass torch work.
She started out just making beads as a hobby but quickly found her groove in making buttons after felting a bag that needed a unique button.
“Buttons became the perfect platform for creating miniature worlds in glass,” she said.
From there, she was enchanted by the idea of creating images in glass — a laborious art form utilizing dozens of glass “canes” layered horizontally into a log shape, melted and pulled to specific sizes, then sliced so it reveals a flat image. The ancient art, often referred to as murrine, dates back more than 4,000 years and is one of the more rare forms of glass art.
About 15 years ago, “I was at a point where I realized if I wanted to get really good at the cane work, I kind of had to dedicate my life to it. And so I closed my massage practice and just went for it.”
Glass work isn’t easy, as it can crack suddenly based on temperature fluctuations or easily get distorted if pulled at the wrong moment or incorrect angle. It’s a delicate dance, she said.
“I’m most known around the world for image in glass, but buttons are kind of my thing, too.”
A single glass image can take anywhere from a week to a year to finish. The more painterly the image, the more glass canes the artwork took to create, McDougall explained.
From hours spent mixing glass to get the perfect color (which takes much more chemistry, time and precision compared to mixing paint) to the meticulous layering of colors to form the design she wants, each glass creation is a labor of love.
McDougall said it’s been a journey starting with simple images before expanding to complex images. Now, she is known for the portraits she makes.
“Faces are supposed to be the pinnacle in this art form” she said, “but I don’t think you ever fully master this art form because glass is so subjective.”
Her Ruth Bader Ginsburg made the cover of the Glass Art Magazine in 2020, and in the Your Bead For Venice competition, she got second place in 2022 for a fortune teller who reminded her of her grandma. She was a top 20 finalist for a Frida Kahlo bead in 2024 and placed second again last year for her rooster design. Those two winning pieces will be displayed at a museum in Murano, the glass capital of the world, and she has another piece in the Corning Museum of Glass in New York City as part of the “President’s Collection” of the International Society of Glass Beadmakers.
She’s visited Murano multiple times and said each time is “magical, you know, it’s just an incredible, humbling journey.” She loves getting to see works of art spanning centuries and rubbing shoulders with the world’s greatest glass experts.
McDougall’s home studio in Bountiful is filled with mandrels and other tools to shape the glass, shelves of glass rods in dozens of colors, a worktable with a torch and a glass kiln to cool off the pieces. Scattered along the tables and drawers are hundreds of little glass artworks, waiting to become buttons, beads or jewelry.
She still isn’t sure what exactly it is about glass torch work that intrigues her so much, other than her love of small things.
“The smaller the better. You can pull that image tiny,” she said, explaining how a glass image could start at several inches in circumference and by the end be just a few millimeters wide. “I love that balance between all the detail you can get in a teeny, tiny space.”
She finds inspiration for her designs “from all over the place,” but gravitates toward nature, especially birds, and inspirational women. Her favorite design, however, is “whichever one I’m working on at the moment.”
“I find that my work takes me on its own journey, especially if it’s been percolating in the back of my head for six years. It teaches me more about me than me actually doing the piece,” she said.
With more than two decades of glass experience, McDougall decided it’s time to start passing her knowledge down and helping build the glass community. She has taught all over the country in private studios and is working with some other local artists to host lessons on bead making.
Many students are intimidated by the art form as many things can go wrong working with fire and glass. But it’s so rewarding seeing her students experience the “glass breathe” moment when they finally get it right.
“Creativity is just fun, and sharing that with people and playing with people … classes don’t really feel like I’m working. It feels like more I’m hanging out with my friends, and we’re all learning to create together,” McDougall said.
Most days, McDougall can be found in her workshop, grinding away at her projects. Even though some people at art festivals and craft markets “don’t quite know what to do with me” and are surprised by the buttons, she loves being immersed with other creators and spreading the art of glass.
“We tend to live in a society where we believe, you know, in individualism and isolationism, and I think that for me, fundamentally, community and coming together and creating together and building together is what life is all about,” she said.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
