Fishes and Fusion:

 Scientist / Artist 

Jerri

Bartholomew

By Sandra Martin

Spring  2003

Assistant Professor Jerri Bartholomew studies fish diseases in her laboratory in the Department of Microbiology at Oregon State University, and most of her current work focuses on whirling disease.  She supervises graduate students at OSU and also teaches, especially in summer workshops for professionals in the field of fish diseases.  Bartholomew has held her position at OSU for nine years, and currently works there ¾-time, also serving as a scientific advisor to the Whirling Disease Foundation in Bozeman, Montana.

Whirling disease affects salmon and trout, and is caused by a non-native myxozoan parasite, originally from Europe.  Myxozoan parasites are very specific to what fish they infect and kind of tissue they feed on; the parasite that causes whirling disease feeds on cartilage tissue in salmon and trout.  In the Intermountain West, rainbow trout populations have been hit very hard by this non-native parasite.  The parasite arrived from Europe in the 1950s, and with common fish stocking practices, it was widely disseminated.  Besides rainbow trout, whirling disease can affect steelhead.  Some other salmonids are also impacted, like Chinook salmon, but they develop resistance more quickly. 

There is a variety of levels of resistance among salmonids, and rainbow trout are by far the most sensitive species.  Whirling disease can be deadly if the fish is very young when first exposed.  Since the parasite impacts cartilage, by the time the fish is nine weeks old and much of its cartilage is turning to bone, it becomes less susceptible to the parasite.  Typical signs of the disease are black tails, distorted craniums, and whirling behavior.  In the wild, it is difficult for fish with this aberrant behavior to survive; affected fish don’t feed as well and they are more obvious to predators.  Whirling disease has erased whole year classes of rainbow trout in some rivers in the northern Rocky Mountains.  It is also found in parts of Idaho, Washington, Oregon, and California, but doesn’t appear to be causing the same level of population decline as in the Rockies.

Bartholomew has a master’s degree in Fisheries and a Ph.D. in Microbiology and has been researching myxozoan parasites for years.  For her doctoral research at Oregon State University, she worked on Ceratomyxa shasta, a parasite that is found throughout the Pacific Northwest and is similar to the parasite causing whirling disease.  She continues to work on Ceratomyxa, but funding is currently focused on the impacts of whirling disease on rainbow trout.

After finishing her doctorate, Bartholomew began work with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Seattle.  She ran a project for several years focused on controlling levels of bacterial kidney disease in salmon in fish hatcheries.  She returned to OSU in 1994.  Her interests in fish and fish diseases began in her undergraduate days at Penn State, but her primary interests were in Marine Biology and in living on the west coast.  Employment prospects in Marine Biology seemed dim, so she switched to Fisheries.  After entering graduate school at OSU, a new-found predilection for Microbiology was a surprise.  The first course in this field that she took was a fish disease class taught by Dr. John Fryer, who later was Bartholomew’s major professor.  His class clicked for her, pulling fish and microbiology together in a new and exciting way. 

 *********

 Jerri Bartholomew is a research scientist, and she is also a glass artist.  She has always created art, often dabbling in many crafts and forms of artwork at one time.  Bartholomew has made jewelry, baskets, and weavings.  As a student, she found she needed a creative outlet and the results of her work also provided some spending money.  She sold pieces of her basketry and weaving in local galleries.  She took classes over the years to help her explore new media and new techniques, and one of the classes she took about fifteen years ago was a workshop in glass fusing.  She found working with hot glass more intriguing than many of the other media she had pursued over the years.  Glass working requires relatively expensive materials and equipment, and so she decided to focus her artwork solely on glass and put her financial resources into equipping a studio to help her explore this medium.

When she started working with glass over a decade ago, Bartholomew did not have her own studio.  She started by renting kiln space in a commercial studio, and then she purchased a kiln and worked in a friend’s space, but each of these solutions was inconvenient to the artist.  Today, she creates glasswork in her home studio, set up in a converted outbuilding behind her house.  She has most of the specialized equipment necessary to work with glass, including one large and one medium-sized kiln.  Other specialized equipment she accumulated slowly over the years includes a large sandblaster, several diamond-bandsaws for cutting glass, and a belt grinder for grinding glass. 

Bartholomew has found that the further she “gets into glass,” she finds more and more directions to go.  After her first encounter with glass at an afternoon course in a stained glass shop, Bartholomew was self-taught for the first five years of her exploration of this medium.  Since then, she has taken a few specialized courses, including one on casting and one on applying photographic techniques on glass.  The latter is a new direction for her that she is excited to explore in the future.  She has found glass to be very experimental; more so than any other type of artwork she had done before.  This expansion of boundaries appeals to Bartholomew.  She spends time on her artwork on the weekends.  Some of her pieces require several firings in her kilns, and so a typical week in the glass studio might include a period of setting up and a firing on the weekend, and a re-fire sometime during the week.  One aspect of glasswork that assists Bartholomew with feeling productive, even on a limited time schedule, is that she can produce pieces relatively quickly; she can create a piece in a weekend, whereas with other types of artwork she has worked in, production of a piece can take much longer. 

She works primarily with fusing and casting glass, not with glass blowing.  Glass casting is a lot like metal casting.  Molds are made from plaster or sand and, if you have a “hot shop” with a furnace, molten glass can be poured into these molds to create objects.  Bartholomew’s studio is not set up with a furnace, though.  She puts cold glass into her molds, which are then melted inside her kiln; a method called “kiln casting.”

Fusing glass is a method of adhering pieces of glass to one another with controlled melting in a kiln.  Bartholomew has been working for the past three years on a series of fused works influenced by microscope slides.  She prepared the first series of these works for a gallery show in Portland, Oregon in 2001.  She actually used materials garnered from cleaning out her laboratory, including glass slides and gels.  These works are more personal to her in many ways than some of her other work.  “I can make a story out of them,” she said. 

Bartholomew enjoyed watching the gallery visitors at her microscope-slide show, and gauging how many of them found these works intriguing.  She found it fascinating to interest people in science with these works—interesting them in a way that she had not been able to achieve before through the usual routes of conducting scientific research and publishing results.  Her work has not been targeted at her scientific colleagues, though she has shown her work in venues where they have seen it.  For example, she had a show at the Portland Airport, and several colleagues remarked to her that they saw her work there, and that they “didn’t know she did that stuff!”

Bartholomew has found that successful work in glass takes a “critical mass of glass people.”  Her hometown of Corvallis, Oregon, while rich in the arts, is not “a big glass town.”  But Portland is just 90 miles north, and the city is a regional mecca for glass workers and glass artists.  Seattle, too, is well known as a center for artists working in glass.  She has sold her work at crafts fairs, but has found that being successful in that venue takes too much time and effort, and prefers the convenience of selling in galleries.  The galleries that she shows her work in have all come to her over the years, through friends and contacts.   

With her interest in science as strong as her interest in art, Bartholomew sometimes feels a conflict between the two.  She was always interested in art, and it was a hard decision for her to turn away from the strong attraction art had for her to pursue science in college.  The science supports the art for her, even though she is a professional artist and sells her pieces in galleries and on commission and believes that she could even make her living with her artwork.  Her scientific endeavors are more than “just a job” for her, though.  She has added several volunteer positions to her workload over the years because of her strong interest in fish disease work.  She has been President of the Fish Health Section of the American Fisheries Society and has been an associate editor for several scientific journals.  Even so, the duality of her interests sometimes pulls her in two directions and she admits that it is hard to be as committed to both pursuits than if she was “just a scientist” or “just an artist.”  Early on, she struggled with the feeling that she was not giving her science the full measure of her efforts, simply because she spent some time doing other things—her artwork.  But over the years, Bartholomew has found the right mix and balance and knows that she can simultaneously pursue these two paths with success. 

Bartholomew does not see much mixing of people from her “art world” and her “scientific world.”  While there is some mutual appreciation, for the most part she feels more comfortable keeping them separate.  Her commercial success as an artist does sometimes add weight to her title as “artist” and perhaps makes it easier to label herself as such.  Commercial success requires self-promotion, something Bartholomew has never been comfortable with.  She finds it especially difficult to do with people who have other interests, like fish biology.  She would much prefer that any individual, including her scientific colleagues, encounter her artwork without knowledge that she is the artist—she would like a viewer to appreciate her work for it’s own sake.

As a mid-career scientist, Bartholomew sees herself pursuing her scientific work for many years to come.  She also sees growth as an artist in her future.  She is currently setting up her own website to provide a “gallery” of her work that can be visited from anywhere.  But she is not interested in setting herself up for large volumes of sales, because that would require too much time commitment for her at the moment.  She continues to take commission works, as well, which provides some steady art-related income for her.  Currently, she is working on a commission to produce sconces for the wall lighting in the ballroom of the student union building at OSU.

Bartholomew feels that she is sitting on the edge of a fence sometimes, but can’t imagine giving up either her science or her art.  Each day brings new challenges for her regarding what to focus on and where to put her energy and efforts, but also brings new rewards as her creative muse is satisfied from both sides of her being, her own personal yin and yang—science and art.