Weaving With Glass
Glass artist Perla Segovia is the designer for this year’s Women to Watch award
Centuries of Peruvian weaving tradition inspire artist Perla Segovia and the bracelets she is designing for recipients of this year’s WILMA Women to Watch awards. While the designs will be similar in color and technique, each will be unique.
WILMA works each year with a local jewelry designer who makes the Women to Watch bracelet, which will be presented with the awards in October. (Nominations for the annual awards end July 1.)
This year, Segovia’s pieces are made in a four-step process that she uses for much of her glass artistry.
The glass is cut and shaped into waves before firing in a kiln. Then a base is made by fusing two sheets of glass and firing them at 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The strips are placed on top and crossed with new strips. They go back into the kiln for a tack fuse.
Before they’re ready to wear, the bracelets will have seen more than eighty hours inside the kiln, much of it with Segovia doing what she calls “kiln sitting,” watching to be sure they’re okay.
“It takes a lot of patience and a lot of waiting,” she says.
Born in Peru, Segovia moved to Atkinson in Pender County with her family when she was ten. She studied basic art at University of North Carolina Wilmington before transferring to North Carolina State University where she earned a B.S. in textile technology.
After graduation, she accepted a job in Peru as a shoe and handbag designer. During her two years there, she took a workshop in glass “where I learned how to draw with enamel on glass, and that’s where it started,” she says.
She followed her new husband and his new Ph.D. from North Carolina State to a post-doctoral opportunity in Italy where she studied pattern making, becoming a certified pattern maker or modellista. Her first child was born there.
Next stop was her husband’s native Puerto Rico where her grandmother-in-law introduced her to stained glass. When her husband’s job took them to Utah, she continued to perfect her stained glass pieces.
“Then we moved to Missouri, and I learned the technique of weaving with glass, one-over-one simple weaves. Obviously I already knew how to weave with fabrics,” Segovia says.
Hand weaving with hand-dyed alpaca is still a sought after fine art in her birth country.
Segovia intensified her training, taking kiln-casting classes, learning to use sheet glass, and to use frit (finely crushed glass) to mold 
into pendants and other items.
“It goes into a kiln at 1,500 degrees. You can manipulate the kiln to work at different temperatures,” she says. “When I’m casting I have to calculate the glass to put in a certain space and calculate the temperature the glass will start to move and do what I need for it to be doing. A lot of times I have to kiln sit. I have to be there at a specific time.”
She credits sheer circumstance with her growing love of glass art.
“When I was starting with the first experience in glass in Peru, and we weren’t married, I had the spare time to do that. It was my hobby,” she says. “In Missouri, the lady I took class from had just opened her studio, and I wanted to get back to fused glass. It was serendipitous. New beginnings. I’ve taken advantage of new beginnings.”
Her latest new beginning is the return to North Carolina two years ago.
“It’s so nice to be home, even though we’ve lived in so many places,” she says. “We’re back in Atkinson. We love it there.”
Segovia’s work is for sale at Cameron Art Museum, Crescent Moon, BigCartel.com and Etsy.com.
