Episode
Chaiah Sullivan: The Cactus Guy
- Published
- Oct 24, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 3205
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- http://www.talkingoutyourglass.com
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/talking-out-your-glass-podcast-558080/episodes/chaiah-sullivan-the-cactus-guy/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/talking-out-your-glass-podcast-558080/chaiah-sullivan-the-cactus-guy.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
Chaiah (pronounced 'Kaya') Sullivan has been impressing the glass world and Instagram followers with his beautiful and intricate cactus-inspired functional glass to the tune of a 94K following and growing. He came upon the cactus after a friend mistakenly referred to another plant pipe he had created as a cactus and decided to give making a realistic cactus pipe a try. "I never really expected to be the cactus guy," Sullivan says. Growing up in Paonia, a small town on the Western Slope of Colorado, Sullivan first discovered flameworking in 2005 at age 14. Two years later, he started working as an assistant at a local hotshop, North Rim Glass LLC. He practiced as a hobbyist while finishing high school, then put all his focus into glass. In 2010, he attended Penland School of Crafts, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. There he studied with Janis Miltenberger, a Washington-based artist who works with borosilicate glass to create large-scale narrative sculpture. Like Sullivan, much of Miltenberger's glass art is inspired by botanical elements found in nature such as leaves and flowers. In 2013, Sullivan took a series of collaborative classes at Glasscraft in Golden, Colorado, where he had the chance to learn from artists such as Salt and Robert Mickelsen, from whom he learned the hollow sculpting technique he uses today. Says Sullivan: "The inside of my pieces have the same contour as the outside. I put all my ridges in and then along each ridge I add dots; once those are all melted in, I pluck each spike out individually. Sometimes I do get a little sick of plucking thousands of spikes over and over and over again. But once you see all your work come to fruition, it makes it all worth it. There's something about making it functional on top of it being…