GA: What is the appeal of the portrait to you?
DH: Everybody is intimately familiar with the human face. The eyes draw me in; the whole world is reflected in the eyes. People have asked me why I don't do landscapes or still life or other kinds of imagery. To me, in the human face, and in the eyes, you can see reflected all the landscapes and all the other imagery in the world. Looking at that person, being drawn in to a narrative with them or beginning to wonder who that person is - that's what motivates me. I try to develop my own answers to those questions. My goal is to challenge the viewer to establish his/her own relationship with the subject. Many times people are so focused on my process. But technique is only a part of what I do.

I provide the face - you provide the story to go with it.

GA: You have master's degrees in both music and library science. How and when did you begin working with glass? DH: I was on the faculty at the University of Idaho as a humanities for a year until I realized that wasn't what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I quit and moved to Denver where my boyfriend Rob was a chemist at a rubber company. He had gone to Georgia Tech when Godo Fräbel was a scientific glassblower there. Inspired by what Fräbel was doing, Rob set up a torch, and eventually I started experimenting with it too. Once I started selling some of my glasswork, I never went back to the real world.

I was in Denver for about 12 years where we had a small gallery. In 1984, I took my daughter and moved to California where my sister Patty was raising her daughter in the San Francisco Bay Area. I moved in with her, and one day when I was doing glasswork in the garage, I told her, why don't you quit your job (she was a medical administrator), and let's go someplace really nice and just do glass. She surprised me when she said, "OK". We moved up to where we are now, on the north coast, right on the ocean. We've been working on glass and raising our kids here ever since.

Patty does some of the production work, all of the business functions and all of our photography. She allows me the time to work on the canes.