Nikhil Saha
Nikhil Saha is an emerging artist working primarily in glass through glassblowing. His practice is driven by curiosity, material experimentation, and an interest in learning across media. Although glass is his main focus, he has also worked with metal, pottery, drawing, painting, and wood.
Saha’s earliest experiences of making came through his grandfather’s woodworking workshop. As a child, he worked with paint on canvas and wood, creating objects from nails, rubber, and found materials. The workshop, filled with tools, machines, dust, paint, and wood, established an early connection between creativity and hands-on problem solving.
Glass entered his life through a small object made by his mother after taking a glassblowing class. The paperweight’s mixed colors and pattern made a strong impression, and Saha asked to take glassblowing classes until he was old enough to begin in middle school. He started during the pandemic and has continued studying the medium, moving toward more independent work in the shop.
His process remains exploratory. Ideas are recorded in a notebook, sketched, revised, and then developed into finished work. When inspiration slows, Saha steps away from screens and returns to observation, drawing, and note-taking. He recommends keeping a notebook for both artistic ideas and everyday details worth remembering.
Saha does not yet work within a single, fixed theme or style. Many pieces begin as sudden ideas, personal memories, or responses to things he enjoys, while broader meanings are added when they feel relevant to the work. He is interested in allowing the practice to develop over time rather than narrowing it too quickly. “It is not necessary to have a specific theme or style yet,” he says. “With enough experimenting, you will find something.”
Color is particularly important in his glasswork. Dale Chihuly’s use of gradients and multi-part installations has been an inspiration, especially the way separate glass forms can become a more complex sculptural whole. Saha also cites Bob Ross as a painter whose landscapes have encouraged his interest in eventually exploring painting more seriously.
As a student, time limits how often he can access the glassblowing studio, so he uses other materials at home when necessary. He is currently improving his glassblowing skills through a range of small works while carving and preparing to paint a wooden model plane.
Outside the studio, Saha continues to work across creative and technical fields. He recently completed a summer college data-science course, collaborating with five classmates on a machine-learning tool intended to detect tuberculosis in low-resource countries. The group is continuing to develop the project with the aim of making it useful and publishing the work.
For Saha, the most rewarding part of art is not perfection but progress: learning a process, trying an unfamiliar technique, and seeing how an idea changes through making. His advice is practical: make time every week for creativity, explore widely, and allow the work to reveal its direction through sustained experimentation.
