Grey Dog Studio
Stained Glass Artist Laurel Johns
Hird Island, Georgia |
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Artist Laurel Johns has spent the majority of her life on the southeastern
Georgia coast. Her artistic vision was influenced early on by growing up
on Cumberland Island, where her father was a ranger for the National Park
Service. Then moving to St. Marys where her mother, artist Janice Kirkland,
turned the dining room of their house into a ceramics studio.
Laurel received formal training in painting, sculpture, and jewelry-making
at the University of Georgia in Athens, where she had originally intended to
study biology. “My heart and grades just seemed to point towards art,” she
says of her change in studies. It was in Athens that she first started experimenting
with glass art, and although she still painted, she found glass to be a medium
which allowed her to freely express her love of color and light three-dimensionally.
After moving up and down the Southeastern coast for a few years, Laurel currently
resides on Hird Island, one of Georgia’s small barrier islands. There
she works on her glass while under the watchful eyes of her beloved dogs, Merrick,
Wyatt, Piglet, and Sam. “For a while, I was living in Savannah, then
Athens, then Atlanta and then Charleston. I was working as a veterinary surgery
technician, which I loved, but when we got the chance to move out to the island,
we had to take it. I just wanted to be closer to the water and further from
traffic.” She and her husband, Richard, have built a home with
views of the Sapelo lighthouse and the open ocean.
When Laurel started working with stained glass she had no idea that it would
grow into a business. “I just started making things that I enjoyed looking
at and it occurred to me that other people might enjoy them, too.” Over
the past few years Laurel has had her work placed in many shops and galleries
along the Southeastern coast, and has been featured in the magazine “Water’s
Edge”. Laurel formally established Grey Dog Studio and, in doing so,
has taken the next step in becoming a working artist. “It’s true
that I live on the coast and that a lot of my art reflects that landscape,
but I think that there is something really universal about glass. I don’t
think that a person necessarily has to understand the beauty of the coast in
order to understand the beauty of glass.”
It is for this reason that Laurel makes a variety of different art pieces.
From the ornamental hanging stars and coastal icons of stained glass shrimp
and flip flops, to the highly functional night lights and salvaged-bottle oil
lamps. “Most of my works have a coastal theme,” she says, “but,
some of them are just for fun. I’ve found that my background in jewelry
and sculpture really help me to push the limits of stained glass. There’s
a lot you can do outside of a two-dimensional panel!” Regardless of theme,
all of her pieces are hand-constructed and none of them are identical. To create
art in this way requires true inspiration, and each unique piece holds a little
bit of the light that first inspired Laurel to piece it together.
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