About Donna Mahan - Fine Glass Artist & Sculptor

Donna Mahan of Provincetown is an artist whose work stems from a great love of found treasures.

Donna Mahan is Featured Artist Member
at the Art Foundation of Cape Cod - 2006

As a child, Donna was introduced to the world of creativity by her mother, a seamstress. After careful observation, she picked up a needle, and by 13 years of age she had sewn her very own Easter coat with bound buttons. From her exposure to sewing and quilt work, she was well on her way to expressing herself as an artist.

Following her passion, she moved to Provincetown seven years ago to dedicate her life to art. Provincetown opened up new possibilities as she completed an apprenticeship with Stephen Donnelly, the renowned glass artist of Tiffany Lamp Studio in Provincetown. It was with this exposure that she first began working with glass in a traditional sense.

The apprenticeship with Donnelly gave Donna the foundation she needed to create her own designs. She calls herself the “collector of found treasures.” “A treasure to me is a found object, abandoned by its owner and rediscovered by me for a new life in my studio.” She finds her treasures on the beaches, relics of life washed upon the shore. The treasures have included colorful textured shells, weathered driftwood, wineglasses, rusty nuts and bolts.

As she creates each piece, she highlights and embraces its intrinsic characteristics of texture, reflective qualities and color. “I often intertwine and embellish the piece with brilliantly colored glass in a composition that expresses my love of texture, color and illumination. Color provides the emotional text of my work.” The end result may be in the form of fused-glass jewelry, a small memory box, lampshades, a free form sculpture, a reinvented window or a rustic birdhouse.

Giving these broken treasures a new life created a healing process for Donna. Creating art from found items helped the artist to repair the fractured pieces of her own life. Inspired by this process, she created workshops to teach others how to use “found treasures” in their own lives as a creative process of healing and self-expression.

Donna expressed appreciation of the support, services and resources that the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod has given her, saying the AFCC provides an "energy connection" that brings artists together and connects them to the community.

Her work has been exhibited at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Fine Arts Work Center, and the School House Gallery, all of Provincetown, MA and The Gallery 142, Deland, FL.

You can find and purchase Donna’s one of a kind art at The Dune Shack and Taqwa Glass, both of Provincetown; Jules Besch, Wellfleet; Tale of the Cod, Chatham, MA and Tr1-aug-07ate collectors nationally and internationally.

A New Life From Flotsam and Jetsam

Donna Mahan at Provincetown Beach While Josh Delaney from the Cape Cod Voice collected various details about Mahan and her creative art expression from found treasures combined with brilliant colors of glass, he noted “when something breaks in Donna’s house it is often a source of inspiration. She once had a cape cod cranberry glass bowl that cracked apart and shortly thereafter re-emerged as a line of jewelry.”

She looked back to childhood for inspiration – the sun st1-aug-07nd gathering from the tides whatever caught her eye. Then in 1999, Mahan moved to Provincetown and went back to the beach to scour the wrack line, this time beachcombing to make a living.”

THE CAPE COD VOICE
December 2, 2004
by Josh Delaney