Margot Glass focuses primarily on drawing, using various traditional methods and materials as a foundation for her work, including traditional silverpoint and 14k goldpoint, homemade organic inks and oil and acrylic painting with mixed mica using fine point crow quill pens in place of brushes.
Glass is inspired by the tradition of idealizing nature in art and design as ornament across cultures while seeking to observe and represent her subjects as accurately as possible in all their irregularity and imperfection.
Central to her work is the exploration of ephemeral, fragile subjects, focusing primarily on weeds, “waste plants” and other plants generally considered to be undesirable, to recognize their beauty in all of their imperfection and asymmetry. Her focus on these marginal plants is guided by the question of what we value, what we consider ‘belonging’ to mean, to highlight the beauty of what is present in the disrupted landscape that we find ourselves in today.
Margot Glass grew up in New York City, and studied at The Art Students' League, Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, and Fashion Institute of Technology. Her educational and professional immersion decorative arts history and applied textile and decorative design techniques inspired her exploration of the dynamic relationship between stylization and imperfection in representations of nature in the subjects she chooses. Her paintings and drawings primarily focused on themes of ecology and fragile plant systems have been widely exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States and internationally, and her work is in private and public collections including such institutions as the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation at Carnegie Mellon, the Weatherspoon Museum, The Del Coronado Corporate Collection, Midwest Museum of American Art, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, The Mark Parker Collection, and Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection. Her work has been featured in publications including Orion Magazine, Watercolor Artist, American Art Collector. She was the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council STARS Artist Residency and is currently working on a site-specific commission for the Arts in Embassies program for a new US embassy in Bangkok, Thailand. She is the recipient of an Oak Spring Garden Foundation Interdisciplinary Fellowship, Upperville, VA and at Lost & Found Lab Artist Residency, Cos Cob, CT. Margot Glass lives and works in Western Massachusetts and has been a visiting lecturer at Smith College in addition to other colleges and museums.