Spokane artist fuses memories into glass
Kara Orcutt’s work is on display at several local galleries and on her Web site. The Spokesman-Review (Photos by Christopher Anderson The Spokesman-Review)
From the Spokesman-Review
Hope Brumbach
Correspondent
March 28, 2008
After Jeanne Phillips’ teenage son died in a car accident last year, she began looking for an artist to creatively preserve his cremated ashes. At a craft fair in Spokane, she met Kara Orcutt, a beginning fused glass artist who never had created a cremation piece, but agreed to check out the possibilities.
The result was the fusing of a friendship and the budding of Orcutt’s niche in glasswork.
“She is a very good artist. Not only that, just the way she handles people and how she handled the whole conversation,” said Phillips, of Spokane. “She’s a very compassionate person. This is not just a sales kind of thing.”
Orcutt created a variety of memory pieces for Phillips and her family, including a blue and green cross, delicate pendants and matching key chains, all with Phillips’ son’s ashes artistically embedded inside.
“It’s a very personal thing. It’s not just jewelry,” Phillips said. “She did a great job.”
Buoyed by her success with Phillips’ memory pieces, Orcutt recently launched Orcutt Glass, a business out of her home featuring unique memory pieces, jewelry, clocks, sinks, tiles and platters.
The memory pieces – which can take the shape of jewelry, water features, tiles or whatever the customer desires – are her signature work, Orcutt said.
She’s willing to create pieces in memory of lost family members, friends and even pets. All she needs is an idea and one-sixteenth of a teaspoon of ashes, she said.
“I want it to touch people’s lives,” Orcutt said. “It’s such a serious and sincere thing, and I want people to know that I will be very sincere with them, and I will put 120 percent of love and compassion into them.”
She has pledged 10 percent of the proceeds from her memory pieces to the R. Cameron Ross Memorial Fund for Teens at Risk, a fund started by Phillips in memory of her son to support programs and projects dedicated to at-risk teens.
“This turned into more of a passionate thing,” Orcutt said of her memory pieces.
Orcutt, 35, has dabbled in art for as long as she can remember, working with beads and taking jewelry classes. She tried her hand at glasswork two years ago.
“It was like an addiction,” she said. She started Orcutt Glass this winter, and her work can be found in a handful of Spokane galleries. She hopes to begin selling her products online.
Her jewelry sells for $10 to $30 per piece on average, and she charges slightly more for memory pieces. Items such as sinks can range from $600 to $3,000, she said.
Fused glass involves stacking or layering thin sheets of glass, using different colors to create patterns or even images. The glass is placed in a kiln and melded through a series of heating cycles.
Orcutt’s Spokane home, packed with color, serves as a display case for her artwork. Fused-glass clocks in vibrant colors hang in every room. Her yard features bright birdbaths.
She teaches glasswork classes out of her garage, which is filled with her tools of the trade. She has kilns for small pieces, such as jewelry, and for bigger projects.
Orcutt said she uses a graduated heating process that creates durable pieces of glass. She bakes her smaller pieces for up to 16 hours; sinks can take up to three days and involve nine layers of glass.
“Pieces have been dropped on concrete and survived,” Orcutt said.
The “sky’s the limit” for the type of work she can create, she said. She’s working on a glass chess set and is beginning to specialize in clocks made from wine bottles, which can feature a memorable wine label or even a special photograph.
“It’s like Christmas every day,” said her husband, John Orcutt. “It’s like, what’s going to come out of the kiln today?”
