JEWELRY Chris Jeffrey
Stained Glass and Fused Glass
"I am hopeful that people will see my work and be opened up to the idea that glass art can be different from what most of us are familiar with."
Chris Jeffrey has been working with glass for over 15 years. His studio is in downtown Barre, a gritty working-class town whose granite industry for the past 100 years has been home to some of the most talented stone artists in the world. Chris draws a lot of energy and inspiration from this combination of artistry and urban tension that makes Barre so unique in the state. His studio is on the third floor of a once-abandoned building in the center of town, which at one time hosted labor rabble-rouser Emma Goldman and now houses artists’ studios and the Studio Place Arts gallery and non-profit arts center. Chris primarily makes stained glass windows for private homes and public buildings, and for some of the mausoleums that are still made in town from world-famous Barre granite. But he also takes great pleasure in working with fused glass, in which several layers of glass are cut and melted together. To make the earrings that he sells at Frog Hollow, Chris cuts small squares of glass, layers them together and melts them in his kiln at temperatures exceeding 1500 degrees. The beauty of the earrings comes from artfully combining strikingly colored glass with patterned dichroic glass. Dichroic (“two colored”) glass has a metallic coating on it which changes color depending on whether light is coming through the glass or reflecting off it. It’s what gives Chris’ earrings their sparkle, and what makes them shift colors depending on what angle they are looked at. The beautiful simplicity of the earrings comes from Chris’ adherence to the maxim that “less is more.” By keeping the patterns simple and limiting the colors, the natural beauty of the class shines through each piece.
www.chrisjeffrey.com
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