“Hutter has more than 25 years of experience making art out of glass. His craft begins with a sheet of plate glass which he and his staff spend hours hand cutting into specific shapes needed to create vases, sculptures, candleholders and other pieces of art. They dye and adhere the pieces together, and begin the process of cutting, grinding, and sanding until the final piece emerges.”  - Terry Weber, Newton TAB, May 12, 2004, p.25

Quasi Modern in Studio	Workspace in Studio

“Whether you call them constructed, reconstructed, de-constructed, or just laminated, Hutter’s work defines and redefines the vessel in a continuous, unending curve of possibilities.”  - Diane Heilenman, “Sidney Hutter: Piecework”, Profitable Glass Quarterly/ Summer 2001

Sidney Hutter with Green, Yellow, Purple, and Blue Polished Laminated Plate Glass Vase

“Many people who are creating artwork out of glass are using techniques that have been used throughout history. I’m making a new kind of glass using a combination of contemporary materials. I’m using the technology of the times, interpreting that technology and putting my signature on it by making pieces that come from creative interests.”  - Sidney Hutter (as quoted by Angela Ginty, “The Art of UV Science” Radtech Report Nov./Dec./ 1998

Gluing set up for a Cubic Heart Vase	Finished Vases Displayed in Studio

“Hutter’s unique work is found in countless private, corporate, and public collections across the United States and worldwide – everywhere from the White House to the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, to several ambassadorial residences abroad and Hyatt hotels in Melbourne and Hong Kong! His pieces challenge simple assumptions about color and volume, and turn the everyday concept of glass as a utilitarian craft on its head. Instead, in his deft hands, glass becomes a fine and adventurous art form. These pieces are at once exquisite and perfect while mischievous too, plays not on words but on shape and color. Think of a wink from a tuxedo-clad dignitary.”  - Pat Waring, The Martha’s Vineyard Times, Sept. 1, 2005 p.8-9

Sidney Hutter cutting 48” x 65” sheet of Krystal Clear glass into strips

“The subtle shades of color, the angles of hand-cut glass and the movement of light are the culmination of Sidney Hutter’s passion for creating art with glass. Cranberry red, sky blue, marigold yellow – a myriad of colors dances within the layers of one vase.”  - Terry Weber, Newton TAB, May 12, 2004, p.25

Vertical Vase in Studio

“Sidney Hutter walks a tightrope between homage and destruction. On the one hand, he loves the vase to death, and is almost slavish in his adoption of its silhouette, of its prominence in the history of glass, and of its echo of a woman’s body in all its supple curves arching to and fro. But on the other hand, Hutter has made hundreds, if not thousands, of sculptural vessels without a single one having even a scintilla of functionality. He challenges us with his persistent emphasis on form without function as he slices and dices the concept of a vase, giving us the poetics of its contour while simultaneously denying it its original use. He does everything to a vase except make it a vessel, and in so doing manages to offer it as a vessel of ideas.  - James Yood “Sidney Hutter Spectral Reflections”, Glass Quarterly: NO.97: Winter 2005 (And more below)

Gluing Circles in Jig	Glass on Crane

Hutter is a coldworker, and his procedure is to stack thin, round plates of glass horizontally, one atop the next, in a sedimentary accumulation of glass slices that accrete into the shape and volume of a vase. Often, delicate films of color are placed between the individual disks as part of their laminate, and as the viewer moves around the sculpture, it seems to shift from clear to highly colored to a rainbow of chromatic interplay. Hutter prefers pungent and psychedelic tones, and there is a great deal of purple, magenta, pink, and orange in his work, particularly in his “Jerry Vision Vase” series, in which horizontal striations of color are kept bouncing around by the multiple plates of glass.

Sometimes he leaves the edges of the individual layers of glass rough-hewn – translucent and with a sharp and cutting quality – and it is here that the color stays to flicker and dance. In other pieces, he will often polish away those same edges to an immaculate and glossy sheen (as in the “Polished Laminated Plate Glass Vase” series), giving them a crisp and aloof quality with the color moving in a more stately and logical pace. In other pieces, Hutter combines the two techniques, seeming to cleave sections of the vase away, tearing out its shape and seeing how much it can be made to bear.

Recently Hutter has been interested in seeing how much of the vase he can remove while still having the piece read as a vase form. It’s like the game where participants remove one slat after another from a table-top tower of wood, testing the limits of shape and always flirting with the possibility of collapse. But collapse it never does. In Hutter’s vision, the vase is simultaneously battered and exalted, disembodied and enhanced, taken to the brink of destruction and made forever eternal, and in the process revealed as the Ur-form that it is.

His work is an open-handed acknowledgement of the weighty legacy of the vase shape in history, and a gesture toward the difficulties of either continuing its dialogue with functionality or walking away from it. All this gives Hutter’s vases a slightly wistful and poignant quality, as if they have come to represent the special significance and power of dutiful worship at a vacated altar.”

- James Yood “Sidney Hutter Spectral Reflections”, Glass Quarterly: NO.97: Winter 2005