Glassblowing is a skill that’s been refined since the first century, but April Wagner of Epiphany Studios in Pontiac is taking the art form to new heights — literally.
Wagner’s delicate work can be found hanging high above the lobby of the Inn at Harbor Shores in St. Joseph, on the shores of Lake Michigan; along the wall above a staircase in Huntington Place in downtown Detroit; and in multiple other places locally and nationwide.
Far from the smallish glass balls usually associated with glassblowing, Wagner’s larger pieces look more like elaborate sculptures than artfully arranged pieces of glass. When you see her installations at St. Joseph Hospital and the Strand Theatre in Pontiac, the Townsend Hotel in Birmingham, McLaren Hospital in Petosky, the lobby of a mediation company in New York, and Excelon Corp. in Baltimore, one would never guess they were glass.
Born in Muskegon, Wagner had an early appreciation for the arts and earned a scholarship to Interlochen Arts Academy, where she initially focused on ceramics and model smithing. She left the state to study at Alfred University in New York, took a class in glasswork, and developed a passion for blowing glass.
“I was in love with ceramics, but then I tried glassblowing and realized I never wanted to work in clay again — I’d found the thing I wanted to do for the rest of my life,” Wagner recalls.
In the meantime, she returned to Michigan and finished her degree at the Center for Creative Studies in Detroit.
“I came specifically to Detroit because the CCS program was so open. I came in as a second-semester sophomore and was able to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, whereas at Alfred I would have had six hours a week as a senior.”
In 1993, before graduating from college, Wagner started Epiphany and began renting studio space and selling her works at art fairs.
Even though she was in business just a few years after taking up glassblowing, she says it took 10 years to develop what she considers an artistic competency in the craft.
“A happy accident is one thing, but control of the material, control of the color, understanding the craft is another thing,” she says. “To put the artistic element on top of it, you have to be a good craftsman first.”
Wagner purchased the current Epiphany facility, tucked into a woodsy area on Orchard Lake Road in Pontiac, in 1997. It’s a 4,000-square-foot hot glass facility and gallery, and the largest glassblowing studio in Michigan.
In 2021, Epiphany expanded into an adjacent 2,600-square-foot space where Wagner creates her large-scale sculptures for corporate, residential, and public installations.
“I really wanted these tall ceilings because I do a lot of work that’s two or three stories tall,” she explains.
Wagner currently has seven employees on staff and will contract out when she needs additional help, which tends to be seasonal.
“At Christmastime, it’s ornaments. Around Valentine’s Day, it’s hearts. We have something going on every season.”
Wagner has four other glassblowers on staff, who each bring their own individual artistic talents to the operation.
“They each have different skill sets, so I have to assess where they’re at and design a career path for them and figure out how I can activate each person.
I try to give them opportunities to grow in areas that interest them,” Wagner says. “One glassblower may be more technical and be able to repeat the same thing many times. Others might be more whimsical.”
All of the Epiphany glassblowers use the same basic techniques and $500,000 worth of equipment, purchased in 2000. Among the gear are two gas-fed furnaces: one is a 200-pound furnace that’s a specialty color tank, and the other is an 800-pound furnace for clear glass. It runs around the clock at 2,000 degrees. When melting glass, the furnace gets turned up to 2,400 degrees. The furnaces were rebuilt last year.
“The bills are ridiculous, and I don’t even get a Christmas card from Consumers Energy,” Wagner jokes.
Epiphany also has two annealing ovens, which take stress out of glass to lessen the chance of breakage. Pieces can spend anywhere from 12 hours to a couple of years in these ovens, depending on the thickness of the glass.
The studio features 1,000-amp electrical service, a generator in case the power goes out, and a huge collection of glassblowing tools.
“We also have a number of safety systems,” Wagner says. “I’m in this for the long haul. I don’t want to kill myself accidentally.”
Most of Epiphany’s creations start out as clear glass, which the artists make from scratch out of soda ash, limestone, and silica sand. “We’re melting it into glass, which makes it first-use glass, which isn’t recycled. We’re not very green in that respect, but it allows us to make really fine art glass that has a lot of clarity, and it will hold a color base.”
The palette of color comes from large cabinets containing glass rods and powders of every hue and shade one can imagine. A lot of the raw materials come from Russia and Ukraine and must be processed in Europe, so the supply chain has been strained since February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine.
Other factors are complicating Epiphany’s supply chain. The supply of lithium, which goes into Wagner’s clear glass, has tightened with the demand for electric vehicle batteries. That issue alone has doubled the price of clear glass.
Raw materials such as cobalt and copper can be acquired in the U.S., but the cost is often prohibitive. One U.S. manufacturer of glassblowing color didn’t survive the COVID-19 pandemic.
“In the fall, we were inundated with orders for pumpkins and we couldn’t keep them in stock because we couldn’t get enough color to make them,” Wagner says.
Another area of unavoidable cost for Epiphany is glass breakage.
“We do have a significant amount of waste,” Wagner says. “Every week we’re throwing out between 150 and 200 pounds of glass. There’s definitely a lot of trial and error before I take something into production.”
When asked if breakage costs are factored into the price of her products, Wagner replies: “That’s R&D.”
Although Epiphany Studios produces about 10,000 hand-blown glass items per year — half for the retail market and half sold wholesale to art galleries, stores, and museums nationwide — Wagner’s passion is her large sculptural glasswork.
“The sculpture work is where I really want to focus my time,” she says. “I really enjoy the hanging sculptures. I think glass is really interesting in the air because it has an inherent motion to it, and you think about it floating over your head.”
Even these major pieces start out as blown orbs of melted glass. Once blown, they’re cut into strips while still hot and formed into the desired shapes. She likens the process to pulling pasta or taffy. “You need to capture it at just the right moment, when it starts to stiffen as it cools down.”
Obviously, these larger works take much longer than a small Christmas or Halloween ornament, especially the ones slated for a public square. A piece she did in Oregon took a year to finish when adding up finalizing the design, consulting with structural engineers, getting all the permits and licensing that were required, and her actual artistic work.
Ultimately, Wagner says she’s doing what she loves and isn’t driven by financial gain.
“I’m an artist. It’s a labor of love,” she says. “There are things I haven’t done or purchased because I’m here working, but this is what I love to do. I love the material. Every day I’m intrigued by the next thing I can make.”
