Thank you for visiting glass by Rachel web site. Purchases may be made through gallery or by contacting Rachel Shoham directly. Special orders are welcome. Please note that size and colors are approximate and can vary.

Rachel Shoham

I always loved color and light, clarity and density, fragility and stableness.  Glass is a solid which is there, but not really there.  Glass is so simple, but yet so rich when the sun's rays are transmitted through a glass panel or a glass object –an ever changing vision of real and imagined beauty.

Glass teaches me about life.  When working with glass, I need a plan, and when that plan takes another shape, I have to be ready with an alternate plan and just keep going.  

In my work, I explore the balance between order and chaos, building and destroying, happiness and misery, with borders being blurred and masks being removed.  My piece "Katrina," made during that catastrophic hurricane in New Orleans, exemplified both the concrete and the abstract, the fragility and the strength of the human spirit.  Symbolically enough, my Katrina became a pile of rubble, but I learned that the process is the essence and not the end result. 

Glass teaches me to be humble and grateful.  No matter what level of experience I possess, there are always setbacks as well as victories.  And sometimes the set back ends up better than the original plan.

The journey to explore what this medium of glass means to me is long but joyous. My world growing up was very concrete; there was no room for dreams.
As I matured, I responded to the need to fill up the "dreaming me" by creating, taming and conquering the material named glass. I am inspired from nature outside, from nature inside, and from everything in-between. I am influenced by the old and the new architecture that I have observed in my hometown of Philadelphia and my homeland of Israel.

In my work I allow myself to leave behind the restricting rules, definitions and limitations. Through my journey of discovery in glass, I am no longer merely an observer, I am a participant.