Jenn Shifflet: A Meditative Approach

Jenn Shifflet’s art consistently mines the immaterial, but this ethereal quality is achieved through
hard effort--for example, her glass relief pieces consist of myriad tiny glass beads, made from
shards (called “frit” in the glass community) by the artist herself, the result of as many as ten
firings for one work. The small glass spheres are laboriously placed with tweezers, one by one, on the surface
on which they rest. Shifflet’s primary concern is communicating the transcendence of light, which exists as
an underpinning for most of her work--the glass works especially. The artist’s recent paintings are usually
circular, sometimes offering concentric circles, sometimes establishing what might be a landscape at the
bottom of the circular composition. The condition of most of the paintings is atmospheric, leaning in the
direction of a mist or fog, whose formal implications are deliberately hidden. Shifflet’s paintings and glass
relief works both embody a usually abstract visionary intelligence but it must be remembered that the insight
is framed by an unspoken attention to natural phenomena, supported by the ongoing experience of light.
– Jonathan Goodman