Amy Buchwald received a B.A. in English Literature from the College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio. Later, while working in computer graphics and design, she began making art as an avocation. While browsing through a gallery she saw her first piece of kilnworked glass and, after researching the process, began teaching herself lampworking and kilnworking.
Her work has been in a number of prestigious and competitive shows; most notably two of Bullseye Glass Company's "Emerge" shows, two Pilchuck Glass Auctions which chose "work from around the globe by renowned masters and outstanding new talents", and The Robert Bateman "Parallel" show where it won the People's Choice Award. Buchwald's work was also chosen as one of 100, out of 2,429 submissions, from 39 countries for the Corning Museum of Glass' New Glass Review #27. This is arguably the biggest competition in the world for glass art.
She has lived in Pennsylvania, Florida, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, Salt Spring Island BC and Victoria BC. She is now very happily residing in Toronto, ON.
"My endless fascination with light, texture and color is why I work with and love glass. Glass is a perfect medium for artistic expression as it has limitless possibilities and brings to all of them its own innate magical qualities.
I'm continuously drawn to the free flowing quality of the organic. I find that whatever particular feeling, thought or emotion I am exploring often translates into the biotic in my work. A feeling of emotional growth translates into an abstract bursting seedpod, sadness becomes rain…. Creating a feeling of movement is also important in many of my pieces—falling, swimming, bursting, being bound—the experience is caught in the moment it is happening.
The glass is organic in form, but these 3-D, curved sculptures are very complex mathematically and structurally, so the organic is incorporated into the structured—as it often is in nature. The bud of a plant, or cell, or a seedpod is both completely organic in look and very structured in form. This union is fascinating to me."