Client: Jane Brucker

Overview

The exhibition, Fragile Thoughts, is a 25-year survey representing Jane Brucker’s exploration of personal and collective history, mortality and fragility. Many of the featured installations in the exhibition are ongoing projects, cumulative over years of creative activity. A hallmark of Brucker’s work is the combining of found objects and heirlooms with other materials—textiles, wood, glass, paper, text, and cast metals—to create works with a resonant poetic spirit and a tactile sensibility. Throughout the exhibition, Brucker’s attention to detail and use of materials reveal narrative passages from her own family within individual works and invite the audience to relate to shared themes and stories.

Goals

For the installation, Brucker made multiple glass elements using various techniques in glass—from traditional painted or leaded glass, to fused glass. Glass as an inherently beautiful and fragile material reflects the artist’s ongoing exploration of the fragility of life and loss. These elements are embedded into antique chairs arranged in a circle, as if in conversation. Interesting is the word “glass” in English is derived from the Old French charité, from older charitet, from Latin caritas (gen. caritatis) (OED) meaning “to care.” Brucker spent time at both our fused glass and traditional stained glass studio, getting instruction from our artists and fabricators to help direct and produce the glass to her specifications.