Glass, light and steel artist Jen Fuller and Douglas Detrick talk about how glass can inspire adaptability, collaboration, and surprise.

About Jen Fuller

Portland based installation artist, Jen Fuller, has been constructing ephemeral glass, steel, and light experiences throughout the United States for over a decade. As a self-taught artist, Fuller found her passion rooted in the traditional techniques of kiln-formed glass, Raku, and industrial welding. Her art reflects the delicate vulnerability and ever present interconnectedness of nature and humanity. Fuller’s work has been commissioned by Metro Regional Government, Ovation TV, Olbrich Botanical Garden, OMSI, Lan Su Chinese Garden, and private collectors around the world.

Episode Transcript

Intro

Welcome to More Devotedly, a podcast for people who see the arts as a force for positive, progressive change. I’m Douglas Detrick, this is Volume V, episode 1. 

As you move through your life, you move into and out of space. You move according to certain rules at some times, and you follow your own personal anarchy at others. At times, you’re under stress, sometimes you are fluid, sometimes you are solid, or at least you are super cool. Glass isn’t actually a solid, but a liquid frozen in mid-movement.

Glass lives by its own rules. Making glass art requires learning them and communicating through them. My guest for this episode is Jen Fuller, a glass, steel and light artist working in Portland, Oregon. 

As a self-taught artist, Jen found her passion rooted in the traditional techniques of kiln-formed glass, Raku, and industrial welding. Her art reflects the delicate vulnerability and ever present interconnectedness of nature and humanity. Her work has been commissioned by Metro Regional Government, Ovation TV, Olbrich Botanical Garden, OMSI, Lan Su Chinese Garden, and private collectors around the world. 

Jen offered a vivid metaphor about what it’s like to work with glass as a sculptor. As she manipulates glass of different colors and other properties, she imagines an ensemble of dancers. The idea is to create a beautiful dance, but when you look at each dancer, you see that this one dances samba, this one dances hip hop, and this one dances ballet. As the glass heats to 1200 degrees fahrenheit  and cools back to room temperature it hardens and flexes in different ways and at different rates. If she isn’t mindful of these differences as she works with it, she’ll end up with a kiln full of broken pieces.

We talked about how this metaphor can help us to understand the human dynamics of social movements and politics. For those of us who lean to the left, we have a wildly diverse coalition to maintain, whereas the Right is far more homogenous. To achieve a beautiful sculpture on our side, we have to move all the parts of the sculpture up to and down from temperature, and if we fail in that task, the parts of the coalition come apart.

I wanted to begin this volume by talking to a glass artist so we could talk about this adaptable yet willful material on its own terms. We met at her NE Portland studio to talk about glass, about what she has learned by working with it, and how the pandemic has affected her.

Interview

Douglas Detrick: So, Jen, welcome to more devotedly. I’m looking forward to this conversation today and as I’ve been doing with all of my guests basically since the pandemic started I just wanted to give the opportunity to just tell us how you’re doing and how things have been for you over the last year.

Jen Fuller: Yeah. Hi thanks for having me. I’m thriving. It feels cautious to say that out loud in public right now, But this has actually been a really good year for me to rest and regenerate in what is usually a pretty intense grind. So it’s exciting to kind of be reemerging into the world with all the things that have unfolded in the last year in my shop and in my persona