Beth Lipman is an American artist known for her detailed glass sculptures that explore the theme of containment. Her work reflects on material culture, mortality, and impermanence, using glass as both a vessel and a barrier. She notes, “You can find yourself on the inside or the outside of the material. Is it something that’s containing you, or something that’s keeping you out?”

In her sculpture Sphenophyllum and Chains, Lipman renders extinct plant species in delicate glass forms. The subject—a genus lost to time—acts as a metaphor for fragility and loss. Encased in glass and bound by chains, the piece speaks to the tension between preservation and confinement, and to the impulse to control what cannot be kept.

Lipman’s broader body of work draws from still-life traditions to comment on human consumption and the fleeting nature of ownership. Her glass compositions recall 17th-century European vanitas paintings, prompting questions about what we hold onto, and what inevitably slips away. Through this lens, containment becomes not just physical, but emotional and existential.