​A New Collaboration: Åsa Sandlund and Preston Singletary

My wife, Åsa Sandlund, brings a global perspective shaped by her studies in France, England, and Sweden. Over the years, her art has been featured in galleries across the U.S. and Sweden.

After 30 years as Senior Creative Director at Nordstrom, she has now retired to focus fully on her own creative journey. Recently, we created a new body of work together during her time as a Visiting Artist at the Museum of Glass, a collaboration that reflects both of our artistic paths coming together in new ways.

Åsa and I met in June of 1993 in the south of Sweden in the “glass kingdom”. She was working with Gunnel Sahlin at the time and I went there to assist Lino Taglipeitra doing demonstrations in Sweden and Finland. We met and fell in love. When she moved to Seattle in 1995 we were married and we started to work together on glass pieces, showing in galleries and Museums. At the same time she worked for Nordstrom during this time which provided us stability as I developed my career.

It was around 2003 around the birth of our second child that she wanted to leave the corporate world and focus on her original idea of being an artist and designer. Once she gave her notice the came back to her to renegotiate her position and so we agreed that she would continue to work and it provided further stability for us as she assumed the role of Senior Creative Director for the company. This continued until the May of this year when she formally retired from Nordstrom.

The summer was quite busy when we both returned to Pilchuck Glass School, me as an instructor with Martin Janecký, and her as a student learning how to kiln cast glass. It was an amazing session and full circle for us being on the campus together for the first time since 1994.

In October Åsa was granted a residency at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma. I was there to help out on a second work station, producing several different series of work that we will include in an upcoming exhibition that will be announced at a later date. We have tentatively titled it as “Latitude 58”, the medium parallel between Stockholm, Sweden and Sitka, Alaska, where our respective cultures and inspiration come from. We plan on creating a multi sensory experience that focuses on storytelling of how we met and blended ideas of Tlingit and Nordic mythologies.