By Michelle McAfee

Sharry Miller radiates a sense of wonder and playfulness with creating art. Her enthusiasm is noticeable, even on her social media pages. When she was ten, she started making things, discovering crochet and counted cross stitch. Later she tried weaving, spinning, basketry, and quilting but found she was always following other people’s patterns. Sharry says, “I’m a maker. I like to make things. But fused glass is the first thing I’ve done that is my own thing, my own creations.”

Sixteen years ago, Sharry took fused glass classes from Lisa Blanchard, who owned the Mermaid Glass Studio in Valdez. When Blanchard and her husband left Valdez, Sharry bought and expanded the studio. She lights up and smiles when talking about her creative space, then asks, “Do you want to see the studio?”

She turns off her Zoom background, spins the computer around, and lets the camera lead. Within moments we forget we are miles apart. She aims the camera at an area resembling a kitchen with wood cupboards, beige countertops, and a dark gray metal kitchen sink. A long table sits near the center of the room, with a work in progress laid out next to several plastic containers full of art supplies. Sharry says this is her glass studio.

Outside the windows of this ground-level room, snowflakes fall steadily on spruce branches hanging low with clumps of heavy snow. Inside, the studio is cheerful and well lit with bright overhead lights and colorful art hanging on the walls. Sharry pans around the room, revealing bookshelves beneath the windows full of glass sheets, paper, books, paints, and other supplies. In the back of the room sits a shiny chrome kiln the size of a small hot tub. She rests her hand on the lid and says, “In 2014, I did a public art installation project for the Gilson Middle School here in Valdez, making 168 salmon. Every student and staff member decorated a salmon. I couldn’t fire all of those pieces with an 8 x 10 shelf in a small kiln, so I bought the big one.” The glass salmon are mounted on stainless steel armature and displayed in the school.

Sharry’s art mirrors the natural world. She is very active, spends a lot of time outdoors and says, “Outside, I’m always seeing things with art in mind, but I’m also looking at everything with the eye of a naturalist.” Sharry has a bachelor’s degree in biology, and a master’s in environmental science, so science underlies everything she does.

Sharry holds up a 14 by five-inch glass piece decorated with fun, poppy-like fantasy flowers with a three-dimensional quality. Then she shows another similar-sized glass piece that suggestively looks like fireweed but isn’t entirely realistic. In contrast, she offers up another brightly colored glass featuring a more realistic female pine grosbeak made with colored glass powders that are layered and moved around with a tool to blend colors and fill the shape. With powdered glass, the colors can’t be mixed to make another color, like with paint. It’s very intricate work capturing fine details in the feathering and markings of the pine grosbeak. Sharry enjoys using different techniques and says not being confined to a specific mold or style as an artist is very freeing and gives her room to experiment and explore.

Photos courtesy of Sharry Miller

Sharry layers glass sheets and melts them together with the fused glass process. How hot it is and how long she holds it at that temperature is how melted together the sheets get. If she layers 1/8 inch sheets and fires them at 1300 degrees, holding it for a couple of minutes, they will barely tack together. If she melts them at 1490 degrees and holds it for thirty minutes, the sheets will melt into a nice even layer. Sharry also makes things out of leftover pieces of glass. “If I take a small one-eighth inch thick scrap, put it in the kiln, and fire it at a full fuse temperature, it will draw in, naturally rounding up into little bobbles.” Bobbles look like glass beads without a hole and are the size of a pencil eraser. She uses them for decorating and designs in her art pieces.

In addition to glass, Sharry started exploring acrylic impasto a few years ago- painting with thick paint using a palette knife to scoop and smear paint on canvas. It’s a technique used to paint birch trees because of the birch bark texture it creates. She’s not trying to be photorealistic in her paintings or glass art. She says, “A lot of my work is figurative, not realistic. I like that. I like to play with colors, patterns, and textures.”

Sharry’s studio is filled with all kinds of materials to create with, but having that many options to choose from can get overwhelming. Sharry sometimes deals with a common artist’s dilemma: imposter syndrome. That is when doubt about an artist’s skill, talents, or accomplishments sets in, stifling the creative process.

Sharry opens up about her current glass project laying on the art table, saying, “I’m struggling to figure out what I’m going to do. Internally, there’s pressure like it has to be good, even better than other work. I have to remind myself that I’m creating this piece for someone who asked for it because they like what I do. I don’t need to be doing something different. That inner critic is the worst one. But I guess it’s like writing. It gets easier when you first start putting the words on the page.”

Sharry’s art is displayed in Valdez and Anchorage, but she would like to find more outlets for her work. “Glass is expensive, it’s a time-consuming art, so some of the pieces I make cost more than others. I want to find an outlet for the higher-end art pieces or discover a way to show pieces that aren’t necessarily wall hangings for homes. One of the projects I’m really excited about is making a series of giant diatoms,” she says.

Diatoms are microscopic plankton, with shells made of silica, that float around in the ocean. They are tiny, invisible to the human eye. When they die and fall to the bottom of the sea, humans mine them for diatomaceous earth. Sharry pulls up a micrograph picture with creatures resembling a showerhead, a sand dollar, a cookie, and a few that look like fancy rice grains with patterns on their backs.

“Diatoms are important. They are the canary in the coal mine. Whatever impacts diatoms in our oceans is going to impact life on earth. If we’ve got ocean acidification happening, that will impact the ability of diatoms to form silica shells and skeletal structures. I want to make giant diatoms of glass. I started three already. They are about 10 inches and look like actual diatoms.”

She decided to make them clear instead of her usual bright colors because they are a species in this world that you can’t see. Sharry wants to make the pieces large to bring attention while keeping that sense of invisibility. She says, “The ultimate goal is to do a show with twenty to thirty, three-dimensional diatoms hanging on a wall with information about them and their importance in our world. I would love to figure out where to do those kinds of art shows, but that imposter syndrome makes it a little hard to reach out to places and say ‘Hey, I want to do this.’”

Sharry teaches workshops in her home studio and is open to offering classes. To learn more, go to @sharrymillerartist on Facebook and Instagram.

More from Michelle McAfee:

Stained Glass Artist Bridget Brunner Wins Rasmussen Award

Birds of the Flyway

Read about other Copper Basin creatives with these past CRR articles:

Quilting is a Labor of Love

Modeling Old Valdez: A Tuesday Night History Talk with the Valdez Museum