EMILY LOMBARDO

Glass artist

By JULIA REISCHEL

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Standing in front of the glowing glory hole at Diablo Glass and Metal, Emily Lombardo maneuvers molten glass out of the furnace and then quickly blows an impossibly paper-thin vase that crushes itself against the floor.

Wowing a crowd is part of Lombardo's job as the studio manager at Diablo, but she's got a larger agenda for working at Boston's main glass studio: fomenting a quiet revolution in the East Coast glass world. Here, glassmaking is considered more craft than art, and Lombardo's been pushing against that tradition ever since she was a glass major at the Massachusetts College of Art.

"I wanted to get imagery on glass, and no one would teach me how to do it," she says. "I spent a lot of time in the printmaking department."

Lombardo should be out on the West Coast, where glass artists have embraced new techniques. But instead of heading for Oregon, Lombardo has dug in here, honing her craft with trips to prestigious West Coast glass studios like Bullseye Glass Co. and the Pilchuck Glass School, bringing what she learns back to Diablo, all in order to seed a new generation of East Coast glassmakers in Boston.

Lombardo's own work relies on "kiln forming," a process of melting colored glass into stacked slabs to create images. It's essentially a method of "glass printing," with glass tinted by metal standing in for ink. Because it's clear and layerable, glass is the perfect medium for juxtaposing images, she says. "You can use the layering to expose the connections between things in life."

Some of Lombardo's work is about juxtaposing incongruous imagery -- like delicate technical schematics superimposed over colorful organic blobs, or molecule diagrams over a cutaway of a human arm muscle. Lately, she's been gravitating toward the tabloids -- one of her more recent pieces is a slab of glass that traps the stenciled outlines of starlets like Sarah Michelle Gellar.

"I try to include everything, even if it's Access Hollywood," she says. "That's what I want to see in glass: inclusion. I'm trying to bring in more people who aren't in the glass world. Because the better glass is in Boston, the better it is for me."

[Emily Lombardo is now showing her work at the 38 Cameron gallery, 38 Cameron Ave., Cambridge. 617.492.2848. Closing reception on Friday, 9.14.07. 7pm. 38cameron.com]