Deja vu is de rigeur for Bainbridge Arts and Crafts’ Bainbridge debut of sculptor Amy Roberts.

For those familiar with Roberts’ dorrs sculpted for Bainbridge public library, the new show may prompt a frisson of recognition.

“The work at BAC is from the mid-1990s, the same time as the library entry,” Roberts said. “It’s so nice to have this work seen on the island, because it’s so linked to the library project.”

The pieces at the gallery consist of sheets of fractured glass holding beam sections in place. The contrasting materials are connected with bolts, rivets and copper plates, with the approximately 3 x 3 feet sculptures displayed on podiums.

In subsequent series, Robert says, sculptures moved from podium to free-standing pieces, and from there to the wall.

“At BAC you can see the tenuousness of the connection to surface, to a base,” she said. “They would later be freed from support structures altogether and become wall pieces.”

Her newest work eliminates design elements in favor of unitary simplicity.

“The new work is consciously very simple and defined by what it doesn’t include,” she said. “It’s the omissions that give it strength.”

The issue Roberts addresses – not letting the medium “carry” the work, which reduces a piece to decoration and design – is one artists working with attractive materials often face.

“Glass is such a naturally expressive medium,” she said. “With glass and seductive materials, the challenge is to have a vision.”

Roberts’ vision first came into focus in the mid-1970s, when she was a painting major with a minor in glass-blowing at Cleveland Institute of Art. Although Roberts left art school without a degree, she continued to study at Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Wash.

It was blowing hot glass that led to making sculpture, she says. Roberts soon established two elements that would persist in later work: mutilating the beautiful glass and building environments to encase the blown work.

Her provocative art began to take off with her inclusion in shows in New York and Chicago, as well as Switzerland, Czechoslovakia and Japan.

She was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts grant and has sold works to museums and corporations.

After her children were born, however, and the logistics of getting to a hot glass shop became too cumbersome, Roberts switched to plate glass – but retained the “unprecious” attitude.

She dropped sheets from the second story of her studio, and smashed them

with hammers.

The stress fractures ribbon through the glass, the internal logic of the fault lines making the art seem organic, a quality reinforced by heating the beams to cause cracking.

“It’s great,” she said, wryly, “to take a beautiful material and just mess it up.”

Roberts’ recent growth as an artist comes after a period devoted to family, including both child and elder care.

“I had my dad living with us and he was on dialysis every day,” she said. “I had children. You think that you’ll never survive this phase of your life.

“But I would also say that process gives back to the work, as well. The content is changed by death and births. And you persist. You don’t give up.”