LUCIE BOUCHER & BERNIE HUEBNER

Lucie Boucher and Bernie Huebner believe that the only relevant bio is their joint bio. A formal résumé would list five advanced degrees and an employment history including everything from hairdressing and firefighting to teaching at all levels from kindergarten through graduate school. By the time they came to glass, they were long past the age to go to art school. But as experienced teachers, it followed naturally that they would make their way self-taught.

Lucie was the leader, entering through traditional stained glass but quickly becoming frustrated with the refusal of cold glass to bend to her 3D mind. She remains the technical expert as well, both with glass and kiln. Bernie spent years teaching both the visual arts and the creative process, and brings a facility with tools and materials—elsewhere called jury-rigging—that serves them well. Of course there’s still considerable role confusion. Who’s the designer? Who’s the glass slave? (And at any given moment, how do you tell?—by counting who’s wearing more bandaids.)

Stuck up on their studio wall is a cliché which says “always make new mistakes.” Given the already considerable loss rate with complicated glass work, there is never-ending opportunity to deepen one’s knowledge of the craft. But sometimes failures—cracks, distortions, contaminants—serendipitously provide the chance to recast a design and salvage the piece. And sometimes the limits of glass lead one into uncharted territory, as with their innovative Glasscapes, the principle of which arose out of experiments with transmitting light through glass edge-on.

It is not all wine and roses. Expecting two artists—each full of vision and relative certainty—to work together smoothly…well, it doesn’t snow in central Maine, either. But more than the work itself, or the joy of a successful piece emerging from the kiln, is the subtle thrill of creating something together, a fusing, if you will, of restless minds.

--Lucie Boucher & Bernie Huebner