The Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery is delighted to announce that Gordon Boyd of Oakville, ON is the winner of the 2025 RBC Award for Glass. Boyd will receive a $10,000 prize, which will support the development of his career at this critical time.
The only national award for emerging glass artists in Canada, the RBC Award is a prestigious honour. Presented through an ongoing partnership with The RBC Foundation, winners and finalists of the award are recognized as the best and brightest of the future of Canadian glass art.
We are pleased to celebrate this year’s RBC Award runner-up, Nadira Narine (Toronto, ON), who will receive a $5,000 prize. We also celebrate the achievement of the finalists for this year’s award: Samwell Guertin (Montréal, QC), Em McDonald (Oakville, ON), and Jérémie St-Onge (Montréal, QC). Each finalist will receive a prize of $1,000 to further their practice.
This fall, the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery will feature the winner and finalists in an exhibition that will provide a rare opportunity for these emerging artists to share their work with an extensive audience while helping to build their careers. An opening reception presenting the 2025 award will be held on Sunday, September 28, 2025, at 2pm.
The 2025 RBC Award for Glass was juried by Benjamin Kikkert, Cheryl Wilson-Smith, and Franklin Silverstone. On the jurying process, they state: “We were thrilled by the exceptional quality and impressive number of applicants for this year’s prestigious RBC Award for Glass. Artists from across the country were well represented, making the decision an especially difficult one. We are truly grateful to have had the opportunity to view such outstanding work and deeply appreciate the time and effort each applicant put into their submissions.”
Gordon Boyd is a Canadian glass artist whose work explores the expressive potential of blown glass as both a functional and conceptual medium. Born in Manitoba and now based in Ontario, he has been working with glass for over a decade. Gordon holds a Bachelor’s degree in Craft and Design from Sheridan College and for the last 5 years he’s been a resident artist at the Living Arts Centre, where he continues to refine his practice and push the boundaries of contemporary glass. With a background in traditional glassblowing techniques and a strong conceptual approach, Gordon has exhibited widely and received multiple awards in glass. His work continues to explore the relationship between material, memory, and storytelling, demonstrating the ability of glass to hold both form and meaning in a uniquely compelling way.
Raised in Panama City, Nadira Narine has a deep interest in her cultural roots. Having lived in Canada since 2011, Nadira explores objects and memories from her childhood as a means of self-discovery and connection to home. Nadira is an Artist-in-Residence at the Living Art Centre in Mississauga, Ontario. She holds a Bachelor of Craft and Design with a specialty in Glass and Textiles, completed a four-year Artist-in-Residence position in glass at Harbourfront Centre, and was most recently recognized as a finalist for the prestigious 2023 RBC Glass Award.
Samwell Guertin (b. 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Montréal, originally from Ottawa. His work explores the sculptural and symbolic possibilities of glass and beadwork, with a focus on geometry, structure, and systems of repetition. Drawing from craft traditions and contemporary design, he creates precise, labor-intensive works that balance formal rigour with playful material contrasts.
Guertin studied fashion design before transitioning to fine arts, graduating from the glass program at Cégep du Vieux Montréal in 2023. In 2025, he presented his first solo exhibition, Quanta+phi, at Maison de la Culture Villeray. His work has also been exhibited at the 2023 Bridges Conference in Halifax and in group exhibitions with Espace Verre. He is the recipient of several awards, including the Houdé-Mendel Grant and the Donald Robertson Grant, and continues to expand his practice through technical experimentation, conceptual inquiry, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Em McDonald is a multidisciplinary artist from Georgetown, Ontario. They received a Bachelor of Arts Degree from York University in Philosophy, where they focused on art and aesthetics. They chose to continue exploring these ideas as a maker and so pursued another degree in the Craft and Design program at Sheridan College focusing on glass sculpture. Em is now a Resident Artist at the Living Arts Centre where they continue to further their artistic practice and teach.
The work of Jérémie St-Onge attests to the ambivalence between functional objects and works of art. The uninhibited approach to his medium allows the artist to deepen the primary meaning of form. Following production, a study of line and colour reveals pictorial, even romantic, compositions. By adopting certain forms and concepts from ceramics and archaeological glass, his practice explores the role of the material that is blown glass in our spaces. These timeless pieces celebrate this ancient technique.
2025 Jurors
Benjamin Kikkert is a Vancouver, BC artist working in hot glass and mixed media sculpture. His work explores impressions of landscape, culture, and technology through texture and patinaed materials. A graduate of the Sheridan College Craft & Design program and recipient of the 2012 RBC Award for glass, Kikkert has served as a past president of the Glass Art Association of Canada and appeared as a contestant on the Netflix series Blown Away. His studio, Vancouver Studio Glass, is located on Granville Island in downtown Vancouver.
Cheryl Wilson-Smith has lived her life in Canada’s North, working with glass to explore the passage of time and her sense of place in the vast world around us. Drawing from her isolated life, residencies around the world and travels she has created a unique image . By manipulating the physical characteristics of powdered glass, she is able to achieve forms that resemble familiar land formations. Cheryl is a fortunate to be a previous winner of the RBC Award for Glass as well as a finalist in numerous other international competitions. She has received a Chalmers Fellowship and her work is in galleries in North America and the U.K with an invitation to participate in a show in Bulgaria later this year.
Franklin Silverstone joined Phillips Auctioneers on reception desk, at 26, Junior partner, 28 full partner and head of the Fine Arts departments in all branches of the company. He left Phillips in 1979 and built his own company, originally based in Montreal. It has been a great honor and pleasure for him to curate the collections of Charles Bronfman for over 40 years and to have been chosen by Pierre Elliot Trudeau to select the artist, Myfanwy Pavelic, who would paint his official portrait. It now hangs in Parliament in Ottawa and has a postage stamp of its own. He is also the developer and Chairman of Collectify, a popular collections management software.
About the RBC Award for Glass
The RBC Award for Glass is presented annually by the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery and is supported by the RBC Foundation. This prestigious $10,000 award allows practising early-career glass artists to undertake a period of independent research, or other activities that advance their artistic and professional practice. One runner-up will receive a prize of $5,000. Up to 3 finalists will also be selected who will each receive a prize of $1,000. Each year, the winner and finalists of the RBC Award for Glass will have their work presented in an exhibition held at the Gallery.
Recipients of the award represent some of the best emerging glass artists in Canada. To learn more about the previous winners, click here.
About RBC Emerging Artists
RBC Emerging Artists supports organizations that provide the best opportunity to advance an artist’s career trajectory in genres such as visual arts, music, theatre, performance, literature and film. Every year the RBC Foundation donates millions of dollars to hundreds of arts organizations globally to help emerging artists become established.
Past RBC Award for Glass Brochures
Contact:
For additional information, contact Peter Flannery, Senior Curator & Collections Manager, at 519.746.1882 x235 or peter@theclayandglass.ca.