A glass act at Crushed Chilli Gallery

JANET Rogers could arguably be described as an accidental artist. She’s never formally trained and, until she turned 40, ran a business selling audio visual equipment. Upon hitting the milestone, however, she decided to sell up and focus on something else. She never thought it would be glass.

“I more or less drifted into this,” admits the 55-year-old. “I’ve always been interested in art and when I started renovating a house, I wanted a stained glass panel for the door. I got a price and it was a lot more than I wanted to pay, so I bought a kit and made my own.”

While she admits that her first attempt was “rubbish”, there was something about working with glass that sparked Janet’s imagination. She began experimenting, working initially from her greenhouse, then moving a kiln into the back of a Spennymoor engineering firm’s building. “From doing the front door and learning how to do the glass, I was just hooked,” she says.

Talking to Janet now, all that seems a very long time ago. For the past five years, she’s had her own premises, Crushed Chilli Gallery, up a side street in the heart of Durham City, and is a fully-fledged, professional glass artist. The gallery, formerly St Margaret’s Church Hall, is a light, bright space, with Janet’s multi-coloured artworks gleaming on every surface. There’s also – incongruously – a large black and white rabbit called Grandad; a refugee, she explains, from her son Dylan’s flat in London.

Janet makes stained glass windows and other decorative and functional pieces – everything from antipasto dishes and cheeseboards to delicate vases and jewellery. She works with the raw materials cold, firing them up in the kiln to produce work that’s imperfect and individual, which she feels only adds to its appeal. She’s never quite sure of the outcome.

“Everything starts with a clear piece of glass and if you’re fusing it, it’s special glass,” explains Janet. “Then you’ve either got frit (coloured particles) or sheet glass and powders. I’m always looking for new processes that make my work different. There are a lot of glass artists who do the same thing and what I’m trying to do is come out with something different.”

One of Janet’s favourite methods is pate de verre – meaning literally “paste of glass” – which involves applying the mixture to a mould to create a diaphanous, frosted effect. She also specialises in restoring old stained glass, sandwiching it between clear layers, resulting in a triple-glazed window.

“I work with a lot of builders and architects,” says Janet, who lives in Sunderland Bridge, near Durham. “If you replace your windows with double-glazed and you’ve still got the original stained glass, I’ll re-size it and then it’s encapsulated, so you’re putting the original glass back in. This is what I did with Spennymoor Town Hall’s council chambers. Obviously, the stained glass has to be in fairly good condition.”

Another recent commission – this time for a new stained glass window – was to commemorate the 600th anniversary of Durham School. It was designed by a pupil and now stands resplendent in the chapel. “That one was lovely to do,” says Janet. “Because it’s so big, I made it in lots of pieces, then it was all soldered together and cemented in.”

The gallery’s location is ideal for attracting students and their parents, along with Durham’s many tourists. As its reputation grows, Janet is also enjoying increasing local support. “I get a lot of support from everybody on South Street – I’ve done a lot of windows up here since I opened – and Durham County Council are very good as well,” she says. “I get a lot of their glass awards.”

Through advertising and exhibitions, Janet has also caught national attention, being commissioned to create a window for the artist Paul Fryer’s home, which originally featured on the TV show Grand Designs. “It was Bolsover Water Works and the design was two electronic pylons,” she says.

Another high-profile client was the former Conservative MP Michael Portillo, who supplied Janet with a piece of wallpaper and asked her to copy it for a window for his hallway. “It was for his house in Victoria, in London,” she explains. “I also did two Venetian mirrors that were made out of coloured, mirrored, infused glass.”

From her gallery base, Janet runs frequent workshops for both adults and children, providing a balance with commissions and experimenting with new techniques. She loves seeing children’s reactions to the gallery and their enthusiasm for creating their own piece of art. “As soon as I put the dates out, they fill up,” she says. “I love working with the kids – it’s fabulous. The questions they ask are brilliant. If I do two days for full-day workshops and the school holidays for drop-in workshops, that still leaves me time to do my own work.”

One area Janet would like to explore further is creating public art. She’s already had a taste of it, having taken part in the Festival of Thrift at Kirkleatham Hall. For her, it was one of last year’s highlights. “They chose five artists and we were mentored by another artist who does public art,” she says. “I made a two metre by four-and-a-half metre-high glass and porcelain hanging curtain from little dishes. There was a fan moving it very slightly and a bright light projected all the shapes onto the ceiling of the stable and it tinkled. I was really pleased with it.”

A dream would be contributing to Lumiere, Durham’s biannual light festival, but Janet feels she might need to shift her mindset from that of a mainly commercial artist in order to be invited. In the meantime, she intends to keep pushing the boundaries and finding new forms for the medium she loves.

“I’ve tried doing other things, but what I love about glass are the colours, the reflectiveness and the textures,” she says. “Also, it changes. It depends on where it’s positioned and what’s behind it. Even as the sun comes up and goes down, it changes.”

Crushed Chilli Gallery, The Old Hall, South Street, Durham

T: 0191-3750644

W: crushedchilli.co.uk