Theresa Cress Artist Statement

“To be really stylish, you need a touch of bad taste.  As the French say, it’s better to have bad taste than very little.”    Marco Pasanella

  There is something about retro Americana that has always held a fond place in my heart.  Formica patterns, Universal movie monsters, and beehive hairdos hark back to days of innocence that, as a product of 1969, I never experienced.  It is a sense of history that is just out of my reach, something I wish I could have been part of.  Pulling images from movies, garage sales and nostalgic books, I create objects that borrow from a past era and combine it with my own to create something animated.   Hot glass lends itself perfectly to sculpting, with its ability to be cartoonish and offbeat, bringing a bit of kitch to the sophisticated and often complicated medium.  The objects evoke feelings of amusement and faint familiarity perhaps of a toy played with as a child, and like a toy, they yearn to be touched.