Features: Health & Fitness

Hearts of Glass:

Silver Spring artist fuses tales, emotions and healing power in her creations

by Robin Tierney

Glass can shatter, glass can cut. But glass can also calm and comfort, which is why "The Healing Waters" now flow within the lobby of Holy Cross Hospital.

"The Healing Waters" consist of seven vividly hued, illustrated fused glass panels, each 18 inches square. The creators are Reston artist Brenda Belfield and Kari Minnick, a fused glass master who lives and works in Silver Spring.

Commissioned for the recently renovated hospital, the works needed to be comforting as well as mesh aesthetically with the entryway mosaic. Another Minnick and Belfield series, "The Seven Days of Creation," leads down a new hallway to the chapel. Response from patients, clergy and hospital personnel has been extraordinary.

Click here to read more– Art: The language of the heart

Increasingly, hospitals are adorning stark, sterile walls with works of art, now that science supports a long-held theory that aesthetic imagery can boost immune system function, reduce stress, counter depression and relieve pain.

When Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Canada, brought art into its inpatient psychiatry unit, property damage incidents declined. After observing how artworks effectively distracted patients from stress and worry, Duke University Medical Center expanded its art collection to 3,500 pieces, most from artists in its community.

In his book, Illness and the Art of Creative Self-Expression, Dr. John Graham-Pole details how engaging patients in the arts helps them cope with physical challenges, express emotions, and find spiritual peace. Art, he noted, helps fight disease and foster wellness through endorphin release, immune function enhancement and direct effects on tissues and organs. Health care workers are also uplifted by artworks.

While cheerful colors and novel, involving, compositions trigger positive thoughts and healing, some graphic and confusing artworks can disturb patients. Many art therapists recommend displaying art that complements a department's focus; for example, images of people engaged in constructive activities for physical therapy settings.

The Creation Series for Holy Cross depicts all manner of life, including wheat stalks swaying beneath the sun, diaphanous white flowers bowing before a glyph-etched tablet and ripe orange pomegranates suggesting fruitfulness in life and work. In Minnick's other "glass paintings," apples symbolize paradise, mystery, and answers to philosophical questions – as well as temptation and risk. But sometimes a fruit is just a fruit, simply a voluptuous form to savor.

"Glass has everything I could want in a medium – numerous possibilities for painterly expression and mark making, transmission of light, opacity and transparency." Glass can also be "slumped" into sculptural and functional forms.

Inlaid handwritten text, graffiti and exotic characters reveal Minnick's fascination with symbology. Sources range from bible stories and fairy tales to personal experiences. Light is as essential as imagery to her work. To distill her distinctive form of "painterly expression," she uses transparency and opacity. A chameleon-like quality results in changing light.

Creation Series 6 by Kari Minnick is a new glasswork at Holy Cross Hospital

In 1994, the artist moved her family to South Four Corners from Alaska. Immersed full-time in art – running a production studio, teaching and creating glass works – Minnick opened a new glassmaking studio in the Pyramid Atlantic Art Center on Georgia Avenue in April 2004.

During this busy year, Minnick joined artists from around the globe in a spring kiln-forming exhibit in Pittsburgh. She also created new glass works for corporate and private collections.

She's now adding to a karma-inspired series, "What Comes Around Goes Around." These personal expressions involve discomforting self-exploration as well as healing; the repetition of handwritten text has the effect of "repeating a mantra to arrive at an answer or understanding," explains Minnick, as she prepares a piece for kiln firing at near 1500 degrees.

Working with her hands is therapeutic: "There is catharsis or resolution during the creative process, and almost always, surprises of the subconscious come out. Sometimes the resulting work is difficult to confront, but ... reconciliation and healing are near." The pieces, she explains, "had to be done."

The artist feels a kinship with the material. "I have an intuition of how certain glasses move in the kiln, how certain glasses need to be cut. Although there are occasional injuries and 'bad breaks,' accidents good and bad, it's important to keep pushing the boundaries of the medium."

In some cases, cracks in glass can literally be healed by heat. "A visible 'scar' may be present but the glass has become whole again ... the scar becomes part of the story."

She feels continually humbled by the medium's physical and mental challenges that give way to transcendent experiences. "Struggle, resolution, clarity, healing.... This is why some viewers respond to the work without knowing the back story," says Minnick. "This is why some pieces give you chills."

Once at a studio in a rough part of D.C., she wrestled days with a piece. "I had finally nailed the composition, was exhilarated, exhausted and headed for the kiln.... The sun was going down and I was the only one left in the building. I had trouble getting the piece loaded; I was spooked by my environment and was shaking and crying. I turned the kiln on and made it home. When I returned after the firing, there was a beautiful tear-shaped bubble embedded in the piece."

Coincidence? She knows only that this work possessed "a power beyond its physicality."

No matter how personal a piece, Minnick wants it to spiritually move viewers. For an artist who works by heart, beauty runs far more than skin-deep.

Art: The Language of the Heart

Photos: Jeff Lautenberger

A natural-born teacher and nurturer, Kari Minnick has worked with many accomplished artists. After 18 months of kiln-side collaboration, friend and colleague Mindy Weisel opened her glass art exhibition "Words on a Journey" mid-September at American University's Katzen Arts Center.

Born in Bergen-Belsen, raised in New York, Weisel spent 18 years in Maryland and now lives in DC. After long years excelling as a painter, this visual storyteller switched media when realizing the transparently layers of glass perfectly complemented a concept involving her father's concentration camp tattoo and her mother's love of things cobalt blue.

"As an artist ... you can lose yourself and get to the heart of yourself where true feeling resides," she reflects on the healing power of creativity. "If an artist doesn't feel while working, the viewer for sure won't feel anything, either."
 
Diving into a kiln-formed glass artwork's layers of color, memories and emotion, the viewer can touch his own feelings about life, love, loss, beauty, excitement. "A good work of art should arouse these feelings in the person doing the looking!" In a conversation with curator Jack Rasmussen, Weisel explained how transparent glass can whisper of a faded past, whereas the more opaque areas can amplify the present. She also loves the mysteries added in the superheated chamber of the kiln.

Early in the glassmaking process, Weisel inscribes calligraphic marks, then manipulates, stains and sometimes breaks up pieces of molten material to fuse and layer the glass into a composition. Works such as smoke-infused "From the Heart" whisper narratives about memory and loss.

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