Friends of OURS

Jenn Justad

A heavy hitter if there was one, Jenn has been in and around the Minnesota Glass scene since it was getting legs. With a heavy coverage of colorful tattoos and an aversion to sleeves, Jenn’s immediate presence is impressive, a tough package of punky determination. Upon meeting her it becomes clear that she is incredibly cool, and constantly heading to the next wildly cool event, and regularly bringing exceptionally cool people into the studio. She’s also a truly generous person, ready to listen to troubles, and respectfully voice opinion, has always approached hard situations with a delicate balance of unwavering hope and a fierce consideration of just. Ty met Jenn when he had just begun working at the studio she had been at for a few years. After sharing shifts for months, they’d become tight in the studio, learning from each other, teaching each other openly and without hesitation, leading to an easy friendship filled with joy and comfort. Since those early days they’ve become out of work friends, consistently work on their separate glass projects together and have now joined again for an OURGlass Friends of OURs!

This Spring we decided to choose Jenn as our Friend of OURS for a few reasons. Her presence bubbles with positivity and to her friends she can be the silver lining. Her work almost seems like an extension of her person. Jenn loves to make work that begs to be held, she wants people to use her glass and find a little inspiration on the daily. She has an amazing eye for combinations of color and has recently been mixing up her own color mixes to achieve the right amount of each per glass. Since taking classes with Claire Kelly and Corey Pemberton, her interest in process has heightened, and she can now regularly be found pulling and using cane. (explained later in this article) She has found that she likes to make functional work, objects that can be used through the day and often, and finds herself drawn to sets of form with unrepeatable color.

For Jenn’s Friends of OURs spotlight, Jenn immediately recognized a process that she felt drawn to that would represent her, us, and the season. Cane-working is a technique that involves pulling a solid mass of glass very long and thin. Usually the mass is about the size of a large tin can, with colored glass running through the center, after getting this mass liquid hot it gets attached to another steel rod and the two are pulled apart from each other until the glass is upwards of 30 feet long, and pencil thickness. The lengths of glass are then cut to an equal length, for Jenn’s work it’s usually 6-8 inches, and rolled around a blowpipe into a tube.

Once this tube of glass canes is warm enough, the end can be closed down to create a bubble on the end of the blowpipe, and voila! a bubble! From there it is business as usual for the glassblower. It is a very complex process that takes quite a bit of time to completely master, it can also be hard to visualize, so click here if you’d like to watch a video to help your understanding.

This technique allows us to use color in thin separate lines as opposed to dots, blobs, or full coverage. In the case of this collaboration, it let us use OUR Glass’ colors in a combined design, on Jenn’s forms. Truly a marriage of design. Between Jenn and OUR Glass, we had to decide on this design before anything else. We chose Rosa, Lagoon, Laranja, and Fog, as our spring colors as they correspond specifically to a Minnesota spring.

To those unfamiliar, Minnesota winter regularly exists anywhere between October and May, so spring is an unpredictable time in weather. We begin to see the grass as the snow melts, and there are some flowers that begin to bloom in April, but snow melt is not very beautiful. City snowmelt is not clean and pure like the mountains. Its full of dirt and dust and garbage and salt and goes from a beautiful pure white to a speckled grey with summer just out of reach. The weather is equally harsh in the months leading up to June, sometimes in mid-March it can be 70 f, sometimes it can blizzard in early-May. For these reasons, everyone involved decided our Fog color had to be the common element in everything made for this collaboration. The two forms are shapes that Jenn uses regularly in her own work and have found their place as a staple in her arsenal.

These colors in this process lend themselves perfectly to a beautiful representation of Jenn, OUR Glass, and this lovely weather we experience together as Minnesota residents.

We are so happy to have Jenn as our 2022 Spring Friend of OURs, this first collaboration of 2022 yielded the most balanced combination between OUR Glass and another artist so far, and we are absolutely thrilled with the results. Ty is a big lover of the process and through this set of work, Jenn and Ty were in the studio before sunrise for four sessions and every working slot the time just flew by. I had so much fun working in and out of the studio with you Jenn, and I know we’ll continue working alongside each other into the future, but thank you again for a fantastic experience. If you’d like to see the work we did together, you can click here, and be sure to check out Jenn’s other social channels below. Thank you again Jenn, it was such a pleasure!

-Tynan Pratumwon

Shop Jenn’s collection HERE

Website: justadglass.com

Instagram: @justadglass