About the Artist

Jessie Oblon is a Virginia based artist, glassmaker and ceramicist who earned her BFA at Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in 2023. Her work has been exhibited at the The Chrysler Museum in 2024, and the Anderson Gallery in 2023, 2022, and 2019. Currently, she is Sam Stang and Kaeko Maehata’s assistant in Augusta, Missouri at the Augusta Glass Studio full time. Her work is significantly informed by her introspective journey, navigating the intersections of her neurodivergence, spirituality, and musical influences, which collectively shape her internal realm, and its expression of the external. Oblon recently worked at the Chrysler Museum of Art Perry Glass Studio as a glass studio assistant, and at the Jamestown Glasshouse as a 17th century style, production glassblower. Oblon continues to develop her own work in both glass and clay and is currently experimenting with lighting design in both mediums.

“My interior realm is fluid. Rhythms and sounds flow through me effortlessly, taking me to another realm. While there, I encounter nonhuman beings and transcend Earth-bound physics. I travel therein without a physical body—in an unconscious state that I can nominally control. In my interior realm, I am the most connected to my truest energetic form.

My exterior realm is grounded. It is a world of the tangible. I anchor my interior realm here. On solid Earth, I take off my shoes to physically connect and stay present in my body. I sense the physical, yet I focus on my breath here. I become an observer in the external world rather than letting the environment consume me. As I walk barefoot in nature, I find staying present to be rather easy. If I am distracted by thoughts, stepping on a sharp rock should snap me back to the present. 

Glass is analogous to my interior realm becoming my exterior. Hot glass is form shifting, like a fluid state of consciousness. It blurs the concepts of liquid and solid, hot and cold, visible and invisible. Full mind and body engagement are crucial to hone the craft. It is meditative and performative, in that my full body is engaged and dances in almost choreographed movements, letting my body flow with the glass. The fluid, metaphysical properties of glass and its delicate, and intense presence draws me to this material.

Ceramics is like my exterior realm, influenced by my interior realm. I observe the clay as it spins. I make direct skin to clay contact. It is intimate, tangible. A material so soft and moldable before becoming a rock attracts me. It is raw, grounded. Even so, the spinning potter's wheel and soft malleable clay hypnotizes and freely allows introspective thinking, feeding my interior realm.

An unpacking and reconnection occurs within my work; almost a battle between my conscious mind and unconscious dream state, my interior and exterior realms. Glass and ceramics have an ongoing debate over what each point of being aims to tell the other. To vitrify means to become glasslike. Glass is obviously vitreous whereas clay, an oblique solid, is not. The beautiful dichotomy of my two passions in visual art exist entirely differently from each other, yet are essentially the same. These two mediums ultimately inform and complete each other. Two opposites that lend knowledge and understanding to each other create a more complete and harmonious being.”