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.