Jennifer Crescuillo is an internationally exhibited artist currently living and working in Silver Point, Tennessee with her family. She received her Master’s of Fine Art in glass at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. She has taught and worked at various glass studios, such as The Studio of the Corning Museum of Glass, Urban Glass, and Pilchuck Glass School. Her work has been included in New Glass Review 34, 36, and 38, and she has been a Wheaton Arts Fellow and an Emerging Artist in Residence at Pilchuck Glass School. Jennifer also operates High Polish Studio, specializing in custom glass fabrication and cold working services.
My work incorporates humor, texture, color, and double meaning whenever possible. I am heavily influenced by antique stores, vintage materials, and reclaimed objects. Growing up in the midwest frequenting giant antique malls and markets left an impact that influences my visual language today. All the thousands of everyday items that were integral to life at one time, and have fallen out of use for whatever reason always fascinated me. Most of the glass that I use in my castings and assemblages is reclaimed factory glass once used to manufacture many of the knick-knacks in those stores. I try to re-process and re-cycle those materials and ideas into new output. I use references to bodily processes of eating-digesting-output as a metaphor for my mental process of thinking-synthesizing-creating. Our bodies take various nutritious items from the landscape around us, combine those items together in our digestive tract, and create our very selves. I use my creative process to sustain my mental existence, in the same way my body uses food to sustain myself. Some references are more literal and humorous in my work and others focus on additional themes. I enjoy using vessel forms, and functional items to interact with the viewer and to welcome the viewer into my world through a familiar portal.
