JENNIFER BARKER

Frozen, May 2008.
Kiln-formed glass components bonded to toughened base sheet with sandblast details
180cm x 60cm

Since I have completed degrees at Wolverhampton and Staffordshire Universities, I have been working as a designer/maker of kiln-fused glass. I have been teaching at a variety of FE and HE institutions and I am currently Head of Glass Design at North East Wales Institute. I run a glass art business, Melt Designs where I have the opportunity to make glass art for both private and commercial clients. The day-to-day challenges are wide ranging and I appreciate that as an artist. It has demanded that I explore, diversify and be more adaptable than if I was working simply to my own set boundaries.

My early specialism was in working with centrifuging glass, where I appreciated the immediacy and thrill of spinning molten glass within a negative mould, but facilities beyond those at university forced me to explore other processes and I have created most of my glass work using a kiln ever since. Despite all of the creativity now taking place with glass in a cold solid state, I have found there are unlimited ways of creating enormously contrasting degrees of shape, form and texture and, 15 years on, I am still discovering new ways of achieving effects with cold glass that I have not before discovered.

I see myself primarily as a designer and therefore don’t restrict myself to selecting any one glass process before a design is complete. Indeed, where glass has presented difficulties as a medium for a design I have looked to make use of other materials such as metals and acrylics where their properties are better suited. I like nothing more than to mix glass with other mediums.

For this exhibition, my piece – ‘Frozen’ uses kiln-formed elements bonded to the surface of a toughened base sheet using an optically clear flexible resin. The piece emphasises the purity of water, and the transition in state from fluid to solid; I wanted to create a work that was asking to be touched; a work whose tactile qualities are as fundamental as it’s visual ones. By overlaying multiples of clear glass strips and melting them at high temperature I had no real control over their exact shape and form once cold again. This random and somewhat unsystematic process beautifully reflects the way in which water falls and freezes and has no pre-determined pattern or shape.

Biography pdf

Jenny barker filler

Selected Biography

EMPLOYMENT & EDUCATION
2008 - present: Head of Glass Design, North East Wales Institute.
1992 - 1995: BA (Hons) Glass, University of Wolverhampton.