Blown Away | Feature in Deep Blue Online Magazine

by ANDREA McHUGH • photography by ERIN McGINN

For all Newport’s glitz — its grand mansions, flashy cars, sleek hotels, head-turning superyachts and buzzy hotspots — Jamestown embodies quiet luxury; a wonderland of nature’s grandeur, wholesome pursuits, and people like Jennifer and David Clancy, who let their millennia-old craft speak for itself.

Traveling along North Road to the very center of Conanicut Island, the second-largest in Narragansett Bay, tree canopies promise generous shade in pockets north to south. The byway dissects peaceful farmlands dotted by grazing Belted Galloway cattle and a saltmarsh straight out of an Audubon watercolor, where great blue herons, egrets, and other noble waterfowl wade unbothered in the honey-hued sun.

Perched atop Windmill Hill, easy to identify by the towering Jamestown Windmill, the Clancys can typically be found flitting about their studio, their collaborative creative sanctuary where the glow of a 2000-degree furnace hums and the artists work in familiar synchronicity. It’s a delicate ballet that only comes with more than two decades of side by side craftsmanship; a familiar flow that merges intuition with artistry.

The husband and wife team share similar childhoods, each showing a curiosity for creating early on. “I grew up being an artist. I used to draw the comics. I was always creating something or drawing something, so naturally, after high school, I wanted to go to art school,” says David, who was raised in Portsmouth on neighboring Aquidneck Island. He pursued his passion for printmaking at Swain School of Design in New Bedford, Massachusetts, but his plans were derailed as soon as he started working with glass. Putting images and designs on flat glass stirred the young artist, inspiring new ideas and aspirations. “I wanted to do something different with the images that I had in my head, but they did not have a hot glass program at the college, so I dropped out of school and I got a job as an apprentice to learn to make shapes that I could put my images on.”

Being able to educate people about glass is really one of the joys of having our own studio. The process gives visitors a little taste for how difficult it is, how complicated it is, how magical it is.

Jennifer Clancy, Clancy Designs Glass Blowing Studio

A creative childhood also rang true for Jennifer, who took her love of drawing and painting to the Cleveland Institute of Art in Ohio. “I thought that I was going to be a photographer, and the college really encouraged the students to meander through every department and get to know a little bit about all the mediums before picking your major, and so in the end, I ended up switching my major from photography to glass,” she says.

Post-collegiate life was a baptism into adulthood. Both spent those years working for different glassblowing artists in Providence, eventually meeting through the studio where Jennifer was working. They married within a year. But it was one of David’s return trips home from the city that would change the trajectory of their life.

“I would travel back down to Aquidneck Island and pass through Jamestown. One day, I just drove by this property, and there was a ‘for sale’ sign on it,” he recalls. “I knew it had enough property on it to build a studio, which was a dream, and it had a house that needed a bunch of work — well, the whole property needed a bunch of work. But it was a project that I was willing to do, and it just happened at the right time.”

The right time as in, the artists were ready to leave the nest and take the daring leap into creating their own art full time, from their own studio, sans safety net. Making their vision come to life, the couple built Clancy Designs Glass Blowing Studio on the north side of their property in 2003, a cozy cottage clad in wide-plank timber nestled on a creative compound that both celebrates and centers the natural world all around with intention. Windows frame an idyllic view; a wooded wonderland rife with swaying limbs that allow chickadees, starlings and Prairie Warblers to take break from flight. Just steps away, the wooden sails of the 30-foot high windmill, built in 1787, catch the salty breeze. And In the distance, the Newport Pell Bridge seems the only reminder that this is not a remote place, and that although it may link the two islands, it unites two very distant worlds.

The storybook exterior is a wild juxtaposition to the studio’s interior, where functionality reigns over any specific aesthetic. Medieval looking tools, sleek metal surfaces, stocked shelves and the rocketship-shaped furnace that seems to hold court are fittingly reminiscent of another age, because what the Clancy’s do dates as far back as the 1st century B.C.

Largely credited to Syrian craftsmen before spreading widely throughout the Roman Empire, the methodology of glass blowing has changed little since its earliest days. The artist dips the end of a punty rod (or blowpipe), a metal rod the artist continually turns, into a molten pool inside the furnace, extracting a glowing, molasses-like liquid called a ”gather.” The artist may repeat this process, depending on the piece they are creating, before or after the gather is rolled on what looks like a simple, stainless steel table, called the marver, conducting the heat away from the gather while the glowing orb is smoothed. After marvering, the artist blows their breath into the punty, forcing the gather to inflate like a bubble, before they apply shears, jacks, paddles, what looks like a comically-sized pair of oversized tweezers to pinch or pull the formation, or even use haphazard blocks of wet newspaper to shape each unique piece.

It’s otherworldly, watching a molten golden glob be cradled into formation; the way the Clancys take the gather, rhythmically rocking it back and forth with punishing pressure but gentle grace. Glass blowing is a game of constant movement; sometimes sweeping, other times meticulous and delicate. It’s an exercise in painstaking timing and a craft that takes patience, precision, then more patience. It’s an athletic, unforgiving, grueling process, yet the exquisite results hardly hint at the intensity it took to get there.

Though they’ve been at it for more than 25 years, the couple never lack inspiration, typically drawing from their pastoral slice of paradise they worked hard to create and the surrounding coastal waters, including the marine life and undersea flora and fauna that lies beneath. “David and I put a lot of time and energy and love into our yard, planting trees and building up gardens, and so we’re really inspired by the natural landscape. I think that inspiration feeds a lot into our sculptural work, and we also enjoy entertaining, and I think that feeds into our production line of functional work,” explains Jennifer. “The gardens, the birds, the fact that we live on the coast in an area where there’s a lot of people who fish, that really plays heavily when we’re doing sculpture.”

I grew up being an artist. I used to draw the comics. I was always creating something or drawing something, so naturally, after high school, I wanted to go to art school.

David Clancy, Clancy Designs Glass Blowing Studio

Rich color is one of the Clancy’s hallmarks, from their functional glassware to complex thought-providing sculpture. Some works involve hundreds of separate glass pieces, each hewn one by one. A recent piece on display at Providence’s Waterfire Art Center was an eight-foot long kelp garden with “swimming” silverfish throughout. It’s an ocean ecosystem brought to life completely in glass, shimmering in swaths of green, blue, and touches of glistening gold.

Jennifer says each artist has their own sensibility with the color palette, but she and David’s approach are completely aligned. “We really love highly colored things. We like using a lot of different colors. We like the way colors react with one another. There are times where we’ve made some quieter pieces that are more monochromatic or minimal, but there’s quite a lot of our nature-inspired sculptures where the colors really are as rich and luscious as you would see it outside.”

The work inextricably ties them to land and sea, a sentiment shared by so many Rhode Island artists, they say, and no more so than in Jamestown, where the couple describes a creative community that’s gathered together for ages, in one way or another, in mutual support. The Clancys were part of the founding group of the Jamestown Artists’ Open Studios tour, a self-guided tour that’s free and invites the public to peruse the working spaces of the island’s myriad creators. The annual event continues today, spearheaded by the Jamestown Art Center, which was founded in 2008.

Glass blowing is a game of constant movement; sometimes sweeping, other times meticulous and delicate.

The island where they live and work also offers the Clancys sweet escape from the rigors of the job when needed. “It gets to be, maybe 110-, 120-degrees in the shop during the summertime,” laughs David. “It’s nice to stop work and go swimming down in Mackerel Cove.”

Never too far from their craft, the couple regularly give lessons to novices. “Being able to educate people about glass is really one of the joys of having our own studio. Glass is such a complicated medium to work with, and teaching gives us an opportunity to really help people have a deeper appreciation for the work that we make and what we have available in our gallery,” says Jennifer. “Glasswork – it doesn’t just fall from the sky. People actually have to put effort in to make those pieces happen.” She adds that the process gives visitors “a little taste for how difficult it is, how complicated it is, how magical it is.”

The magic of it all, remains unchanged, whether crafting blown glass or discovering it for the first time.

“I sort of like the idea that 1000s of years from now someone might be finding our glass as if it were some of the Syrian bottles that we’ve been exposed to in museums,” reflects Jennifer. “It’s a natural medium, and that has its own special feeling about it; that it is something that the silica from the sand or from quartz comes out of the Earth, that we’re somehow working with nature, as well as being inspired by it.”

It’s an exercise in painstaking timing and a craft that takes patience, precision, then more patience.

Deep Blue Details

Clancy Designs
Glass Blowing Studio
382 North Road
Jamestown, RI
401-423-1697

ClancyDesigns.com

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