Meet Janet

After retiring from an academic career at Michigan State University, Janice turned to fusing glass years after her first hands-on experience at the Corning Museum of Glass, and established her studio in East Lansing, Michigan.

A native of Sacramento, California, Janice is self-taught in regard to her sense of color, composition and spatial relationships and draws on her appreciation of the forms, motion and contrasts of the natural world.

She expresses her creativity by combining assorted colors and handmade streaks and highlights of opaque, transparent and iridized glass in combinations using a genre she coined Kinetic Balance. Each fusing provides an anticipated and unique, but often unexpected, transformation of glass created by the high temperatures of the kiln.

Artist Statement

As an artist, I strive to create art that stimulates positive energy and an escape from the woes of life. I hope the viewer will integrate other senses, in addition to sight, while experiencing this exhibit.

The glass-scapes create a Kinetic Balance between color and light with the aim of providing the viewer with a realm of order and calm that stands in contrast to the chaos of the external world. The relationships between each area are based on contrasts between geometric shapes and empty spaces–multiple layers of glass–compared with the glass foundation. The suggestions of movement and stasis are intended to kindle an intellectual playfulness.

The sounds of glass tapping against glass can be both jarring and musical, bringing together the interplay of light, color and sound. The viewer is urged to gently move the strands of glass–to contribute to their kinetic energy–to experience Kinetic Balance.

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