Stephanie Trenchard: Casting Womens' Narratives in Glass

Stephanie Trenchard's multi-disciplinary creative process includes painting and poetry along with cast glass. With a focus on biographical stories of how women artists have navigated careers and partnerships, motherhood and making a living while still focusing on their creative practice, the work also discusses the price the art has to pay in this grand juggling act. The artist prioritizes the actual experience of the work, making and seeing it, over the classification of genre or ownership of an idea.  Says Trenchard: "I create my own visual vocabulary in storytelling. Using these totems, I tell stories about the artistic experience and the ensuing personal relationships usually based on true stories of artists from history. The subject of these narratives is often revealed in the title of the piece, but it is not necessary that the viewer be familiar with the subject in order to understand the concept because the metaphors are universal to the human condition." Her work also involves using art as a way to communicate local activism as seen in her project About Sturgeon Bay. Born in Champaign, Illinois, in 1962, Trenchard earned her BFA in painting from Illinois State University in 1984. Subsequently, she and glass artist husband Jeremy Popelka relocated to San Francisco, California, where Trenchard designed textile patterns, licensed and sold under a private label. Upon returning to Sturgeon Bay Wisconsin in 1997, the couple built a hot shop and gallery that they share to this day. They assist each other with work as well as teaching projects, such as their recent classes in Thailand. As she assisted Popelka, Trenchard began to see glass casting as a means of translating textile patterns and other imagery to glass. The discovery of Paradise Paints allowed her to combine painting skills with glass art in the development of her award-winning body of work. Trenchard has developed a unique method of creating art using glass combined with paint. She first creates fully realized figures or objects in clear glass, which are then painted with high-fire enamels that are mixed and blended just as with oil or acrylic paints. Next, these three-dimensional objects or figures are submerged into molten glass encased in cubes and rectangles of clear sand cast glass. Each cube or rectangle is created so that they can be fitted tightly next to one another or on top, making a totem like structure. Coldworking is required to achieve the perfect fit. She states: "I have been following my own interests and curiosities concerning how these women have navigated their careers and artistic practices. I represent these ideas in glass through the details that speak to me, particularly the ephemera of material culture, furniture and clothing that encapsulate their era and class. I also rely on posture and facial expression to reveal the nature of the subject as I intuit it." In addition to teaching in her studio, Trenchard has taught workshops at Pratt Fine Art Center, University of Wisconsin, The Studio at the Corning Museum of Glass, The Bergstrom Mahler Museum of Glass and others. She was a lecturer at the Glass Art Society Conference, Murano, Italy, and established the first hot glass school in Southeast Asia, at Bangkok Glass, Thailand. Recent exhibitions include: Beyond Giving, Inspiring Change, Singapore Art Week, Singapore; Matriarchs of Mastery, Habatat Gallery, Detroit, Michigan; A Creative Place, Trout Museum, Wisconsin; and Beyond the Ceiling – Women of Studio Glass, Sarasota, Florida, Habatat Invitational, Michigan. Awards include Trenchard's 2025 Featured Poet award, presented by After Hours Journal, Chicago; 2023, 2024 Prize Winner at Habatat International Exhibition; and the 2020 AACG Wisconsin Artist Series at Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass. Says Trenchard: "Telling stories is what cultures do to understand the history and identities of the people. The small details in my work open up a conversation about the personal experiences of women in the arts as interpreted through history."