Meet Martha

Martha in the Garden

I am the artist behind marthakauppi.com, and of course, this blog. I work primarily in glass. Most of my glass art is made from a combination of techniques, including blowing, torchworking, and kilnforming. I frame my work to hang on the wall, where my pieces interact with your life in the same way a painting would, but with no paint.

Occasionally I cook up a body of work in encaustic. This technique uses thin layers of melted wax, oil pigments, and various other things to make a piece that looks like a painting, but with lots of depth, and possibly found objects imbedded in the piece. My encaustic often includes compost-dyed silk, which I burn patterns into before imbedding it in the wax.

In my spare time, I love to dye and spin fiber, and knit. My love of fiber combined with my work in glass led to the creation of glass knitting needles, and some unexpected publicity for my needles led to me creating a method for you to buy my needles online without interacting with me at all, which will be much simpler for everyone than the way I did it in the past, which involved lots of email. While the streamlined online method is simple, it is also a little impersonal which makes me kind of sad, so I started a blog. This way, if you find you want to interact with me a little bit, you can, and that way I can get to know you too.