Glorious Glass: Maggie Wagner's Unique Glass Creations

In 2014, Maggie Wagner bought a blown glass vase from an art show. Proud of her purchase, she placed it in the center of her dining room table.

“My cat, Bruce, jumped up on the table and basically smashed the entire vase into a million pieces,” recalls Wagner, who, in her day job, manages environmental health and safety systems and compliance for Akron’s Babcock & Wilcox.

Trying to find a way to fix the broken vase, the North Canton-based Wagner stumbled upon the art form of fused glass — in which fragments of glass are melted together in a kiln. Using books and DVDS, she began to teach herself how to create colorful, eclectic pieces around 2015 — collecting kilns, tools and more.

“It’s fun after you’ve had a bad day at work, and you’re like, I want to just smash something, and I can take a hammer and literally take a bag and smash the heck out of glass and then use it to create something,” says Wagner, who now creates fused glass items such as platters, bowls and sink basins under Drat That Cat Glass — a name inspired by Bruce and the children’s book Mog the Forgetful Cat by Judith Kerr.

Wagner starts by ordering from Portland’s Bullseye Glass, which sells compatibility-tested glass. It comes in many forms, including a powder form, stringers, or long cuts of glass in a noodle-like form, a salt granular form and more.

“I start by putting it in the kiln, then use a variety of methods, including combing ... or dam it, slump it in molds, or I’ve even drilled holes in flower pots, elevated them off the kiln shelf and melted glass through them,” Wagner explains. “There’s so many different processes that you can use, but I have to use all the same glass in doing so.”

After the glass is fired — full fusing, which produces a fully blended, smooth piece of glass, is at about 1,490 degrees, while tack-fusing, which preserves the shapes and dimensionality of the different glass pieces, is at around 1,350 degrees — it’s cold worked using a diamond saw, vertical band saw or similar tool. This helps regain the desired shape of the glass. The glass is then fire-polished and slumped into ceramic or over stainless steel, creating a 3D shape.

Before making a full-size piece, Wagner crafts samples to try out different combinations of glass.

“It’s making little 1-by-1- or 2-by-2-inch samples, or sometimes I’ll make little 4-by-4-inch bowls that I can then scale up to sink size of a 22-inch sink,” she says. “It’s about experimenting and not being afraid to fail.”

She remembers the first piece of art glass she created and was proud of — made in 2016, it was a flat, 16-inch disc that looked akin to a tortoise shell and was sold at the Akron Art Expo.

“It was really hard to actually let it go,” Wagner recalls. “I had basically taken strips of glass and tack-fused them, which meant I didn’t let them go completely liquid — I just let them adhere to the other layer underneath it.”

Now, Wagner sells her platters, bowls and other creations at festivals and through Don Drumm Studios & Gallery — as well as some jewelry items through her website. Find pieces made through techniques such as screen melt, which utilizes a baker’s cooling rack.

“I did one that looked almost like a sun, like a solar flare,” she says. “I put yellow in the middle, then I had orange and then red. I mixed it with white, and it gave a really kind of cool feeling to it.”

Find bottles, fused glass vessel sinks, cheese boards and more at Art-A-Palooza in Green Aug. 15 and the Canton Woman’s Club Holiday Boutique Oct. 2 and 3. Wagner recalls one couple who bought a royal blue- and French vanilla- colored reactive platter and loved it so much that they requested a matching bowl.

“You always remember the people that really are really interested in your work,” Wagner says. “I love talking about it with them. … It makes it special.”

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