Combining painted panels with delicate planes of kiln-fired glass, Kate Clements explores the nature of fragility. Glass is “a material defined by its capacity to hold tension,” she tells Colossal. “It can break, shatter, or shift at any moment. That awareness of impermanence has long been an undertone throughout my work: a nervous hum beneath the surface.”
Clements works with a granular substance called frit, which she composes into forms like leaves, insects, and birds directly onto a kiln shelf. When fired, these colorful drawings fuse into wafer-thin panels, which she then applies to painted panels or suspends in installations. Often incorporating patterns evocative of wallpaper and motifs that suggest architectural structures or niches, she plays with relationships between rigidity and fluidity and the artificial and the organic.
“The material has become almost an extension of my hand and my body through mark-making and scale,” Clements says, sharing that the process is quite meditative. “It’s about precision and intuition coexisting—knowing how to shape the material and when to let the glass move on its own terms in the kiln.”
The versatility of the medium, balanced with its inherent changeability, continues to fascinate Clements—especially the tension between control and risk. Like any material fired in a kiln, it has the potential to react in surprising ways or transform differently than expected. And once assembled into large-scale works through a process the artist likens to collage, the thin panels appear very delicate, like sugar sculptures, as if they could crumble or break with the slightest touch.
“Earlier pieces leaned into that unease,” Clements says. “I was drawn to the way glass can induce anxiety—the uneasy power of beauty that could, at any instant, turn on its head. That instability felt like a mirror of the world around us: alluring, dangerous, and unpredictable all at once.” More recent works build upon this sensitivity while emphasizing the ethereal qualities of the translucent medium, suspending delicate panels from the ceiling to create more solid, architectural forms.
Clements’ sculpture titled “Acanthus,” reminiscent of a gleaming triumphal arch, is on view at the Nelson Atkins Museum in the group exhibition Personal Best through August 9, 2026. New work is also in NOCTURNES, a solo show in the art gallery of Kansas City Community College, which continues through November 14. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.
