Sally McCubbin is a solutions-driven artist and designer. Her faceted career surrounds the pursuit of finding challenges, the simplicity of beauty and personal joy. Born in Toronto, the youngest of four, Sally learned to find solutions, at an early age. Today, she continues to explore and strategize in Prince Edward County with her husband, illustrator Clayton Hanmer and their daughter Alice.
While maintaining an independent art career for over 15 years, Sally also leverages her talents as a freelance web designer, a teacher and a digital strategist. Sally’s foundational studies in Craft & Design established her intimate relationship with the value of quality. Since 2005, her artwork has spanned a variety of fields from industrial design to public art and can be found in private and public collections in Canada, the United States and Europe. For this work she has received a number of grants and awards, most recently from the Royal Bank of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Her top accomplishments include the execution of two public art installations along one of Toronto’s transit corridors, receiving a funded artist residency at the Tacoma Museum of Glass, and multiple funded research projects in Scandinavia, Germany and Australia. In 2008, Sally founded Studio Huddle, a studio / retail / exhibition space that pooled the efforts and resources of twelve young artists and designers. This venture was foundational to Sally’s business development and fostered pivotal professional relationships.
From 2009-2019, Sally taught courses in professional practice, design, glassblowing technique, and business planning at Sheridan College. Imparting on her students the realities of fieldwork, she encouraged embracing failure as a key tenet of design. A once devout glassblower, Sally has been honoured with teaching opportunities at Pilchuck Glass School (USA), GlazenHuis and Bild-Werk (Germany). Her work in glass has provided her with granted travel for professional development and research throughout the United States, Scandinavia, Germany, Australia, and New Zealand.
“I am trying to make these objects that are important to me because they include my ideas about the world, politics, or social trends.” – Sally
