April Surgent | The Sea Lives With Light

Traver Gallery is pleased to present April Surgent’s new exhibition, The Sea Lives With Light. With this new body of work, Surgent vastly expands her engraving vocabulary. Utilizing a new set of tools, she carves large single glass panels into delicate and brush-stroked sea-scapes. A departure from her multi-panel format, these new landscapes flow effortlessly, allowing her empyreal depictions of the Pacific Ocean to roll, float, and breathe on the surface of the glass without disturbance. Her work is visual poetry, evoking the brief but transcendent feeling that we encounter on the edge of the horizon, where the sky, ocean, and humanity touch.

April says of her work, “Raised in the Pacific Northwest, a deep appreciation for the sea was instilled in me from a young age. My life-long love for the ocean has taken me from Antarctica to Alaska and this body of work is a collection of some of my experiences at sea. Imagery for the work was pulled from pictures that I have taken from all around the Pacific Ocean, spanning from 2013-2019…These engravings recall the feelings that come only from time spent with nature and lie on the fringes of memories and dreams.”

April started working with glass in 1997, at open-access hot shop studios in her hometown of Seattle, WA. She went on to study at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia where she earned a BFA with honors majoring in glass and graduating in 2004. In 2003, Surgent met master Czech engraver Mr. Jiri Harcuba (who later became her mentor) at Pilchuck Glass School and changed her focus from blown to engraved glass. After completing her studies in Canberra she moved back to the U.S. where she set up an engraving studio. Surgent exhibits, teaches, and lectures internationally and has received many accolades for her work.