Hot Shop Hot Nights with Eriko Kobayashi
Date
Friday
Jun 06, 2025
Hot Shop Hot Nights with Eriko Kobayashi
June 6th, 2025 | 5-8 PM
The Hot Shop at Hilltop Heritage Middle School
During their week-long residency, renowned artists from the glass community set up in our hot shop, creating their own works, sharing with our students about their processes and experiences, and collaborating with Hilltop Artists.
The week culminates on Friday for our Hot Shop Hot Night, when we welcome our community to see the visiting artist and our young artists in action.
At Hot Shop Hot Nights, expect to see a professional glass artist working with and mentoring our advanced production students and alumni, creating spectacular collaborative pieces. The Gallery is open for shopping, and tea, hot cocoa, and coffee will be available.
As a thank you to our Murrini Club members, they may reserve their tickets before they can be claimed by the general public starting April 25th. (Murrini Club members will receive a link in their email once tickets are available.) Tickets are available to the general public as of May 14th.
This June, Eriko Kobayashi is in residence at Hilltop Artists!
Eriko Kobayashi (b. Tokyo, Japan) fell in love with the color and texture of glass in 2014. This fascination led her to study at Toyama City Institute of Glass Art in Japan (2016), and later pursue her MFA in Glass at Southern Illinois University (2022). Kobayashi recently relocated to Seattle to continue her career in glass.
Artist Statement
I am exploring how my experiences are connected to everyday objects. In modern society, we are surrounded by a variety of objects, and we unconsciously consume commodities of our own choice on a daily basis. I believe that we make decisions about our clothing, food, and everyday requirements based on a feeling of intimacy and sympathy with the products. Unexpectedly, the mundane objects around me can trigger vivid nostalgia that causes memories to flow through my mind in obscure fragments. These fragments replay in my head, repeatedly, in specific situations, becoming malleable and animated. While imagining a particular scene and transforming the object, I confront my own experience and engage in a personal, ever-growing relationship with the object. The objects I chose to represent are selected because they are close at hand and because they are mine.
As a glass artist, it takes skill to take something as intangible as experience and reshape it into glass art. However, no matter how much my technique improves, I know that I can do better and that is why I fight with materials that allow me to endlessly accumulate experience, which is my main theme. I always seek new invigoration and try to make pieces that deepen thought and give off positive, curious feeling. The discipline required to convincingly create an object in glass demands that I spend a long concentrated period of time making that object. This time becomes a meditation of sorts allowing me to focus on the object and the original experience that formed my inspiration
Check out Eriko’s Instagram (@eriko_glass) or visit eriko-kobayashi.com to learn more.
