Jesi Yager / Adapt / 03.30.2026 - 04.20.2026
Adapt is an installation of tools and methods I have developed during my MFA research. While my primary medium is hot glass, I also use fibre, wood, metal, and any material that is called for in process-led investigation and creation. My practice centers around heuristic processes, embodied learning, and inventing methods. My recent work is a reflection of and on my experience living in a body that has been challenged by severe chronic pain and amputation. This exhibition turns the focus from the more narrative artworks of my MFA show and towards the process of creating. I often describe the process of glassblowing as a collaboration between myself and the molten glass, which is full of its own energy and feels very much alive. It is a collaboration mediated always through tools that serve to transfer my energy and intent through touch to the glass, and likewise to convey information from the glass to my body. This dynamic transcends glass–tools in every medium translate the poetry of a body into form and mark. Tools learn their user, hold history, memory–sheers wear according to the specific grip of their user, a pen nib wears according to how one writes–the tools we create with are an extension of ourselves. As a maker in a non-normative body I refuse to let the limitations of existing tools or work spaces define what I can do or how I can create.
Throughout the fall of 2025 I have focused on creating and adapting tools to continue my work in the hotshop and fibre studios while coping with a medical setback that prevented me from wearing my prosthetic. I drew up designs and specifications for converting my wheelchair into an adaptive glass blowing bench, I worked with faculty to adapt an existing loom to function with a single foot, and I invented a novel jig for bending and weaving glass threads to create complex patterns. Each tool has been through a rigorous development process, tried, refined and reworked with as much attention to detail as any object I could hope to make with them. This wheelchair puts my body back in motion, allows me to dance with the glass, to feel the subtle shift of the glass as it reheats, to time the rotation of my blowpipe to the beat of my heart and my breath and the movement of the glass as it softens. The adapted loom allows my body to feel the rhythm of the shuttle and beater as the meditative pulse of weaving calms my mind. The glass weaving jig is an entirely new tool and method I have developed to bring the textures, patterns and structures of weaving into my blown glass, extending the possibilities of what can be. Without these tools, none of my current work could exist.
As I have learned to adapt, I have also leaned into the collaborative nature of glass blowing. It is through the strength of community that these objects have been realized. I worked with Logan Lape in the welding studio to create the rails for the glassblowing wheelchair. I collaborated on the one-footed adaptations for the loom with Mackenzie Kelly-Frere and Jolie Bird in the fibre studio. I crafted the wooden base for the glass weaving jig in the woodshop with the help of Dara Humniski, and the copper punch cards were assisted by Brett Hollingsworth. Each project stretched my world as I learned new skills and the varied materials formed new ways of thinking. In collaborating with thinkers outside of glass I found tools became a bridge of understanding, a kind of material language for making. This exhibition celebrates the strengths of the AUArts MFA in craft–its people, the power of creating in community, and the excitement of a place that fosters development of new ways of making.
Jesi Yager is a current AUArts MFA candidate in Craft Studies with a focus in Glassblowing. She is a queer amputee immigrant artist whose work explores the generative power of non-normativity: to be adaptive is necessarily to be creative and resilient. She splits her studio time between creating work and adapting or inventing the tools necessary to translate the poetry of a body into form and mark.
@jessicayagerstudio www.jesiyager.com
