Meet the "Suburban Wednesday Addams" Who Makes Art Out of Death

The workroom at Flux Studio is hot from the blazing furnace that Danelle Rains uses to craft her swirling glass sculptures. From buoyant teardrops to hearts and spheres, the shapes are flush with bright, spiraling hues — as well as intriguing flecks that glimmer like snowflakes.

Cradling one of the pieces in her hands, Rains explains that her friends call her the "suburban Wednesday Addams" because, similar to the fictional youngster, the local artist isn't afraid of what others may label creepy or dark. And that's been necessary for her artistic endeavor, Memento Mori: Those sparkling flecks shining from her glass pieces are cremation ashes.

"Some people, when they ask about it, they're kind of creeped out by it," she admits with a laugh. "Other people think it's the best idea. It's really a personal thing, just like grief is very personal. And I just love that it's something that I get to do.

"The whole idea behind it, rather than having it be something like an urn that's somber that you kind of keep hidden away, having something to display and show off that you have this beautiful art that used to be your loved one," she explains.

Rains has been making cremation memorials for two years, after learning how to incorporate ashes into glass from her original mentor, Jessica Schimpf of Mantra Glass Art, who has since moved from Colorado. "She was the one who taught me how to do it," Rains says. "It's a niche thing, and not a ton of glassblowers do it, and she was one of the few in the Denver area at the time when I started who did it a lot."

She knows that her pieces aren't just artworks — each one is a representation of a life lived and lost, to be honored by vivacious color and shapes. As she explains how the glass is heated, cooled and shaped with the remains of loved ones, it echoes a quote from Chase the Rainbow, by Poorna Bell: "Grief that arises from death is fire, and in this fire you will be remade into something different, something that feels and sees much deeper than other people around you."

The memorials, pulled from fire, evoke that depth like a phoenix — a mythological creature that Rains adores. "I love the idea of fire as an agent for rebirth," she says, "and being able to take essentially silica and fire and create something that makes somebody come alive to somebody else again."

It's an emotional art form, to be sure, and her pieces are emotive before you even realize what you're holding. Perhaps that's the palpable energy of the person inside, like a genie in a bottle; perhaps it's because Rains invokes her work with so much thought and intention. And perhaps it's both, as Rains suggests. "I'm a little woo-woo," she admits. "In my astrology chart, I have Neptune in the eighth house, and one of the things that stems from that is I have this weird fascination with death. I have this dreamlike quality to where I don't really think that death is a tangible concept; it's more like it's a person to me. So I feel more like it's me interacting with that person, that personification of death."

When Rains is commissioned to make a memorial, she has a one-on-one consultation to discuss what her customers expect from the work. A box of tissues is usually handy. "So much of it is just being able to let somebody express their feelings and let somebody feel what they're feeling," Rains says. "I've had consultations where they start telling me stories and I'm sitting there crying. And nine times out of ten, I do it at coffee shops, and so we're both crying in a coffee shop.

"But it's cathartic, and it helps me to realize that grief is what helps us hold on to life," she adds. "It's what helps us seize life. Because it's what reminds us that we're only here for a short while."
Rains is a person with whom it's easy to talk about death. She has a warmth and calmness about her, and that's helped customers open up to her on such a heavy topic. "Part of my process when I meet with people face-to-face is I'll ask them for specific memories, beloved stories, because at heart I'm a storyteller," she notes. "And when people relive that moment in their memory, as they're telling me the story, for a flicker of a second, that person is still alive to them. And that is amazing to witness, and it is overwhelmingly cathartic, not just for me, but for them. And I love to help people in that way."

Her calm nature also helped when Rains was a dispatcher for the Colorado State Patrol. "It was the greatest job I ever had — or job job, I should say, because clearly, this is much more rewarding," she says. "But every day I got to improve somebody's life. And yeah, I had bad days — some days that I think about to this day, ten years later — but I wouldn't trade it, because I got to learn a lot about myself."

She also learned how to ask for help when she needed it, and in 2022 that led her to work with artist Jesse Guess, a new mentor who currently assists her on the memorial pieces. "I wasn't getting to where I wanted to with my glassblowing," Rains recalls, when her cousin suggested she ask Guess, a longtime family friend, to guide her.

"Why didn't I think of that?" Rains remembers thinking. "So the next day I called him, and we've been working together ever since. Even something simple like that...to just ask for help, to show me the things that I'm not figuring out myself, was huge."

After quitting her full-time job, Rains concentrated on becoming a full-time artist. "As I started thinking about it, I thought about what ways I could help people," she recalls. "And one of the things that I love about being able to do these cremation memorials is that I get to help people process their grief, and I get to help them be a little bit of an outlet."

Rains is a fourth-generation Denver resident, and creativity runs in her blood. "I come from a long line of stagehands," she says. "I am a little different in that I'm branching out into the visual medium, but really, it comes naturally to my family to be attracted to these kinds of creative endeavors."

Creativity isn't the only family tradition she's honoring: "My husband and I recently renovated my great-grandparents' house. That's now our home, where we are raising the fifth generation of kids of our family," Rains says proudly. "My family has had this house since the ’50s, and we've always lived in it at some point."

When she's not there with her kids, she's at Flux Studios or selling her non-crematorial wares at craft fairs. Being able to make monuments for people to treasure forever, though, is what lights her fire.

"If I could do this until the day I die, I absolutely want to do that," she concludes. "I love being able to have this gift and sharing it with people, to help bring them peace."

Visit mementomoriglass.com to learn more.