September 2024: Jen Fuller - Pâte de Verre

Jen Fuller is a self-taught artist working with glass, with an emphasis on Pâte de Verre technique. Trompe-l’œil is French for “deceive the eye. In art, it’s a fancy term for making one material appear to be something else. Jen travels the country working with heritage gardens to harvest special plant specimens to create these 100% handmade glass sculptures. This technique is called pâte de verre, or “paste of glass”. Fine layers of colored glass powder are sifted one at a time into a handmade mold like an intricate sand painting. And when fired in a glass kiln, achieves this hyper-real glass botanical effect. Jen Fuller honed her mixed media approach to artisanship as a commercial fabricator in the 3D props departments of Adidas, Nike, and Universal Studios. Awarded an emerging artist grant from the William T Colville Foundation in 2010, Fuller built her first glass kiln, which allowed her to transform her knowledge of advanced mold making into an ongoing and boundary pushing exploration into kiln-form glass. Recreating the garden in kiln-formed glass embodies the interconnectedness of history and humanity, of nurture and nature. Each piece in this series is originally sourced from a historical space, molded in plaster, then tenderly recreated in glass one layer of colored powder glass at a time. Each Botanical honors the tenderness and fleeting life cycles of the earth; the intentional moments they were hand picked and transformed into glass by the artist; and your connection to the temporality of it all.