Joe Hobbs says he does glass but really it’s the glass does what Hobbs wants it to do, and Hobbs tells it to do extraordinary, magical things. Sometimes he desires the glass to take human form, other times he wants it to look like objects we use every day, only now they seem impossibly beautiful. Most of all, Hobbs wants the glass to remind us. Of what is not always important as the remembering is itself. Hobbs sees a connection between the glass and our own memory, the way how in one moment a memory can take form and be molded, then later crystallize and become so fragile and transparent.

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee but raised in Sonoma, California, Hobbs studied at the Rhode Island Institute of Design and the California College of Arts. Most recently he earned his BFA from the University of West Florida and has worked with glass for nearly two decades now. He was recently the artist in residence at the Hot Shop in the Orange Beach Art Center in Alabama and now wears more hats than he can count at the Centre for the Living Arts in Mobile, Alabama.

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