Being made redundant from the charity Mind led to Juliet Forrest becoming a stained glass artist

Her favourite works are the glass pictures of coral reef, such as the one hanging in the front window in her home at Walkley in Sheffield.

“The coral reefs use a variety of techniques and in full sunlight certain bits glow brightly. There’s lots of texture and it really sparkles,” she says.

Juliet fell in love with coral reefs when she discovered diving while travelling after university. Her last dive was on her honeymoon, and that seems a long time ago now.

“You kind of catch me at a bit of a strange time, in that my husband died last year aged 43, totally out of the blue. It’s been just over a year now,” Juliet says.

Dave, who worked in IT, helped by welding metal for the garden ornaments, making stands to display the ornaments. He even built an extension for her small workshop.

At 45, Juliet is picking up the pieces of her life. As it happens, ending up as a stained glass artist was, she says, “pretty random”.

At university she studied zoology, with a vague eye on conservation work, but says she didn’t study hard enough. As a student she made and sold greetings cards, continuing this when she left. She kept that up for a few years, then studied occupational therapy, eventually finding a job with Sheffield Mind, working on anxiety management, and then becoming the lead on the anger management course.

She painted through all that and her paintings began to sell for what she saw as a decent price. After she was made redundant by Mind, she dabbled in glass and “fell in love with it straight away”.

Although you can buy Juliet’s fused-glass ornaments for a modest price, the coral reef hanging in the window costs £1,240, due to the time and skill involved.

Juliet also works on a larger scale, including making two replica panels to match an original Georgian stained glass window for a house in Uttoxeter.

“That’s probably the hardest thing I’ve done,” she says. “The guy was completely gutting the house and building an enormous extension. This old window has been moved from a different part of the house, and he wanted these made to match.

“It was such a challenge. There were about four different types of paint to match. And all the different glass, and some glass doesn’t react nicely to some paints and stains.”

She didn’t install the panels herself, as they weighed about 120 kilos each. Although proud of that work, she wasn’t in a hurry to accept such a big project again. The sunburst windows or those coral reefs are more her style – “a bit more organic, a bit more colourful, a bit more contemporary”.

Still, Juliet cannot have totally gone off big projects, as she has just made that installation for the University of Sheffield, in a building due to open in December.

A moment of hasty ambition saw her apply to make a public art sculpture to go outside the building – “A massive, £150,000 thing.”

Juliet didn’t win that one, a relief really as she’d never done anything like that before, but instead she was asked to make a piece to go inside the building.

Called Exchange And Flow, her work is a series of five panels in a partition wall between a cafeteria and the main area.

“I was very excited,” she says. “They wanted something that referenced the social sciences and the relationship between the city of Sheffield and the University of Sheffield, the exchange of information, the spirit of collaboration.”

What she has made reflects the rivers of Sheffield, the flow of knowledge, and features columns that represent data in glass.

“The inspiration was graphs, so it’s like data, or journals on a shelf. They are two metres tall by 60cms wide.”

The work should have taken three months, but she only had two, and ended up working weekends and 14-hour days, delivering her piece the day before the deadline.

Her workshop wasn’t big enough to build the project, so it more or less took over her house.

“There’s been quite a reclamation of the house since then. It is much more like a house,” Juliet says.

Where she lives has a panorama of Sheffield hillside, a view she sees while taking the few steps to her workshop and its small glass kiln. In this she heats pieces of glass until they melt and fuse. The glass must be compatible thanks to the rules of coefficient expansion, as different types of glass expand and contract at different temperatures in the kiln. She also fires traditional painting, such as is found in church windows, too.

Juliet would love a bigger studio, with a bigger kiln to match, but such spaces are difficult to find, and she has been on a waiting list for Yorkshire Artspace for years.

Last year, Juliet won the Stevens Competition, although Dave was in hospital at the time, and her success didn’t really register.

“It would be fair to say I didn’t properly capitalise on that kudos, but such is life,” she says.

“The competition is run by the Worshipful Company of Glaziers and Painters of Glass, one of the oldest livery companies in the City of London. They find a real potential commission and base the competition on that.”

Her winning entry was for an architectural glass commemorative screen for Haberdashers’ Girls School in Elstree for a former headmistress.

“It’s a big deal in glass,” she says.

Juliet originally pursued the sciences as the art world seemed “kind of pretentious”. She enjoys exploring science in glass, and one of her striking pieces, in a lightbox on the kitchen wall, portrays a proton beam unit.

She was also best newcomer at the British Art Biennale, having entered as an afterthought.

As for her chosen artform – “Stained glass… is it an art or a craft, it’s a ridiculous debate. Like it if you like it but don’t get to het up about it. I view myself as an artist who uses stained glass as a medium.”

Next March, her work will feature in a book by Catherine Dunstan entitled Creative and Professional Development For Glass Artists, described as a “practical guide to finding your creative voice and planning your journey in the world of glass”.

Juliet’s own journey in the world of glass looks set to shine and sparkle.

Examples of Juliet’s work can be found at www.julietforrest.com

Details of Catherine Dunstan’s book can be found at www.gatherbooks.co.uk