Mandy is an interdisciplinary artist, architect, and designer whose research-based practice investigates questions through environmental, material, political, and human histories. Themes in recent work include documenting environmental change in Northern Colorado, where her early childhood was spent, and understanding Czech glassmaking history through a socio-environmental lens. She holds the degrees Master of Fine Arts in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design, a Master in Design Studies from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and a Bachelor of Architecture from Virginia Tech. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and she was a ‘22-’23 Fulbright grantee in Czechia.
My studio practice is a processed based laboratory that engages perceptual experimentation and multi-perspective storytelling. Being investigative in nature and positioned around specific questions, the work will often be defined by the artifacts of a process. My current work engages how to illustrate more nuanced elements of large scale losses which has taken form in several recent projects including Czechia’s shifting glass industry and, personally, a digestion of loss and realization of changed landscapes due to increasingly severe and destructive wildfire where I spent some of my childhood in north-central Colorado. Through these questions, I develop multimedia works including sculptural elements and videos that address these topics through the lenses of personal experience intertwined with histories of material and policy. While the questions pertaining to a changing glass industry in Czechia or wildfires amidst Colorado’s Front Range seem worlds apart—conceptually and physically—I try to make an imprint of what is lost before it fades, evolves, or recasts into something else.
My studio practice is a processed based laboratory that engages perceptual experimentation and multi-perspective storytelling. Being investigative in nature and positioned around specific questions, the work will often be defined by the artifacts of a process. My current work engages how to illustrate more nuanced elements of large scale losses which has taken form in several recent projects including Czechia’s shifting glass industry and, personally, a digestion of loss and realization of changed landscapes due to increasingly severe and destructive wildfire where I spent some of my childhood in north-central Colorado. Through these questions, I develop multimedia works including sculptural elements and videos that address these topics through the lenses of personal experience intertwined with histories of material and policy. While the questions pertaining to a changing glass industry in Czechia or wildfires amidst Colorado’s Front Range seem worlds apart—conceptually and physically—I try to make an imprint of what is lost before it fades, evolves, or recasts into something else.