Etsuko Ichikawa is exhibiting a dozen works that are based on an extraordinary technique. They actually are the record of a performance by the artist, but they stand alone as artworks.
About twenty years ago, Ichikawa accidentally dropped molten glass on the floor from the end of the “punty,” the long wand-like tool used in making glass sculptures. The burn mark that the glass left behind was so beautiful that she decided to develop the technique of burning paper with molten glass.
Her work with the wand captures her swaying movements, highly controlled, but also freely moving in overlapping patterns on the paper. In many of the works currently on display—all made in the summer of 2025 in Washington state—she has added blue watercolor gestures that interact with the brown burn marks.
“My Glass Pyrograph is an abstract drawing on paper made with fire by scorching molten glass,” she described. “This work captures and eternalizes the immediacy of a moment, and it is a trace of my body movement with fluid glass.”
The result is a conversation between the lines of blue and brown. The watercolor strokes highlight the character of the burned abstractions and amplify their swirling movement, but the difference with the blue stroke is dramatic: it is transparent, it can create drops, it feels safely spontaneous. The burn marks must be the result of a highly controlled action.
To understand Ichikawa’s drawings, it helps to look at the films on her website. She lifts the long wand with a ball of molten glass on its end toward the paper, we see it drop onto the paper and flame up, then die, leaving the burn marks behind. The technique is based on a performance that requires great concentration and skill.
Etsuko was born and raised in Tokyo and graduated from Tokyo Zokei University in 1987. She came to the United States to attend Pilchuck Glass School in 1993 and remained as a studio assistant to Dale Chihuly until 2003.
She then began to make art independently and travel around the world. In 2024, she went back to Japan after her father died and is still living there, although she spent last summer in Seattle when she made these fascinating drawings. Although these works on display are quite characteristic of her style in terms of the technique and the approach, she has also created some extraordinary video works.
On her website is the video Echo at Satsop. As she walks around a power plant, we can experience its enormous size. There is a single view up to the sky framed by the asymmetrical shape of the power plant walls. The artist claps her hands together and creates an eerie echo over and over. Ichikawa’s interest in nuclear power plants began after the accident at the power plant in Fukushima Japan in 2011. But, of course, all Japanese carry the trauma of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II and its long aftermath of illness.
The artist has also made vitrified glass balls one of which is on exhibit at the Wing Luke museum. They are made from, as described by the artist, “vitrification technology which transforms radioactive waste into glass for ultimate disposal.” They glow with swirling greens and blues that have an unsettling beauty.
The glass pyrographs, as the artist calls them, on exhibit at Winston Wachtler, affiliate with drawings. It is hard to believe that the delicate lines are created by a controlled gesture from molten glass dropped from a long wand. As the fire flares up along the line of molten glass we marvel that it dies so quickly, for there is a sense that the gesture, uncontrolled, could set the world on fire.
