Goldie Poblador with glass sculptures from “The Rise of Medusa” presented by MONO8 Gallery during this year’s Art Fair Philippines. Photographed by Sela Gonzales
Between scent, sound, and sculpture, Goldie Poblador wants everyone to know that her glass blowing isn’t fragile work.
For such a delicate art form, blowing glass demands a great amount of physicality. Goldie Poblador, one of the Philippines’ rare glassblowing artists, says that it’s much like learning choreography where heat, glass, and gravity are your dance partners.
“Imagine twirling honey from a jar,” she says. Through years of practice, she has mastered how to manipulate the molten glass into pieces of art. In swift motions, she anchors it onto a steel pipe while also blowing into it, using her own breath to expand the glass from the inside. As the glow of the heat dissipates, the delicate sculpture reveals itself, finally hardened enough to stand on its own.
These days, Goldie is best known for her delicately feminine glass art. Coming from her recent Art Fair Philippines show and a performance at Makati’s WhyNot art space, she is making a lasting impression by pairing her sculptures with sensory performances. Between scent, sound, and sculpture, she wants everyone to know that her glass blowing isn’t fragile work. Her pieces are monuments made from her courage and grit through the years.
This year, she exhibited The Rise of Medusa, a collection of glass sculptures inspired by the Verde Island Passage’s (VIP) recovery from a devastating oil spill in 2023. The shimmering sculptures merge sea creatures like the anemone, jellyfish, and nudibranchs with the female form.
She incorporated these pieces in a performance with artist Arvin Nogueras, also known as Caliph8, and presented them with scents made in collaboration with M Dougherty of the Olfactory Art Keller Gallery. In Medusa, the sculptures hold pools of scent that echo the tragedy and resilience of the ecosystem: “Oil Spill,” “Dead Coral,” and a more hopeful “Verde” scent. Through sound sculptures modeled after the molecular weight of each scent, she immerses the audience in an auditory performance created with curator Erwin Romulo and sound composer Ben Richter.
The performance is a coming together of artists from the US and the Philippines, but also a testament to over a decade of her commitment to the art form. The first time she encountered glass blowing was during her thesis in the late 2000s. While researching for a project exploring scents, she envisioned custom perfume bottles to hold the scents she would make, but didn’t know how or where to fashion one herself.
On her jeepney route to her university, she spotted a store making lab glassware (like beakers, flasks, and test tubes) for the nearby schools, walked in, and asked if the people there could teach her how to blow her own glass bottles. Their equipment was rudimentary, but the experience was enough kindling to ignite her passion for the art form.
After graduating, she began applying for grants and scholarships in glass blowing schools abroad, finding herself in Italy at the Abate Zanetti Glass School, the Pilchuck Glass School, and the Corning Museum of Glass. She briefly returned home to the Philippines and eventually earned a scholarship at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2012. After RISD, she had no time to waste and stayed in New York, singularly focused on honing her craft in a highly competitive city.
“You have to stand out because there are hundreds of other artists that are better than you, and if you quit, there are 50 others that are waiting to take your place,” she says. “You could make me perform in the gutter there, and I’ll do my best.”
Goldie has pursued greatness in this craft that required so much time and effort from her through the years. And for her, it’s because the art gives as much back in return as well.
The first piece from The Rise of Medusa came about in 2021, around the time New York City experienced a surge in hate crimes, especially directed towards Asians. During those years, she had experienced the violence herself, which instilled in her a deep fear. She parallels those experiences of violence in New York to the slow, but assured recovery of the ocean.
She found comfort in her routines at her studio. Glassblowing became a kinesthetic outlet to relieve her of the trauma. “I think glass blowing is kind of a way for me to enter myself,” she says. “I just enjoy sculpting and performing. Being in it makes me more myself.”
The third scent from her performance, “Verde,” is inspired by the news of the VIP’s designation as a “Hope Spot” in the Philippines. Notes of citrus and green mango waft from her sculpture as a tribute to the thriving life that still endures at sea.
Goldie hopes to see herself in those small, but significant creatures swimming in the waters.
“No one really sees them because they’re too small… but then that’s how you kind of feel in New York: Invisible. Small,” she says. “But then secretly you’re like, ‘Okay, you can do it, little guy, you can survive. Get back up and do it again.’ You have 50 rejections in your inbox; you want to cry. Okay, I’ll give [myself] one hour to cry, but then the next morning [I] get back on it, you know.”
Goldie raises the glass of water from the table. “I’ve been here since January, and when I get back, I’m gonna suck,” she admits. She’d been staying in the Philippines for three weeks. Which also means, she hasn’t practiced blowing glass for that long, too.
“So, to make a glass like this perfectly, this symmetrical, this is the work of a master that can do this after 50 years of glass blowing. Unless you’re gifted,” she says, placing the glass back down. “I’ve seen these gifted young people. I am not gifted. I had to really put in the work. So I’m gonna have to work every day [when I get back] to get back up to the level that I was in.”
When she returns to New York, the glasses she will blow might become a little lopsided again, out of lack of practice, but her body will remember the motions. It will come back the same way old choreographies come back to any performer, as long as she practices again.
Hopefully, a few more years and she’ll work her way up to the skill level she wants to see her pieces in. Hopefully, I don’t get injured too often as well, she adds. But until then, she’ll continue blowing glass in her studio, perfecting the choreographies that mold the molten glass.
