MASTER IN GLASS

Name: MASTER IN GLASS
Author: Allan Antliff

by Allan Antliff

August 31, 2006

12:00 AM

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Fall/Winter 2006 Cover

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Gary Bolt Process 3

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Gary Bolt

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Morna Tudor

MASTERS IN GLASS

BY: Allan Antliff

LISA SAMPHIRE

Lisa Samphire began her career in 1985 and today is one of the West Coast’s leading glass artists. Most recently she has been working with the murrini technique, a painstaking and time-consuming process that results in mosaic glass works of dazzling complexity. Standard murrini pieces are opaque and the designs tend towards stacked uniformity. Samphire has gone in another direction. Her works are semi-translucent and the patterning is asymmetrical, organic, open-ended, and visually arresting. Undulating lines disrupted by squares and rectangular forms appear scattershot across the surface. After each piece is blown, Samphire roughens the surface to bring out the richness of colour and sharpen up the contrasting design elements. Standing back and viewing a work frontally, the dense interplay of lines and modular forms appears to flatten out, creating a remarkable illusion of flux in which each piece flutters between two and three dimensions. The tension is very entertaining, and the bold and innovative advance of colour and form, so unexpected in a three-dimensional medium, is mesmerizing.

Samphire has been inspired, in part, by the work of Austrian artist and architect Fritz Hundertwasser (1928 - 2000) who created brightly coloured mosaic works derived from vegetative forms in which irregularity was the key theme. His stated purpose was to emulate the growth patterns in nature and, to this end, he associated himself with an artistic sensibility that was pre-modern and pre-industrial. So too does Samphire, and perhaps this is appropriate, given the nature of glass work and its foundation in pre-industrial craft traditions.

Apart from the work of Hundertwasser, Samphire has studied Persian carpets, Iranian textiles, and shawls from the Kashmir valley region of India. Woven baskets created by the indigenous peoples of the southwestern United States have been an additional source of inspiration. Certainly the irregular play of lines in her vessels, crimped here or elongating there as if conforming to a rhythm not of their own making, appear to emulate the “imperfections” of woven materials.

The passage of time inscribed in the making are features that distinguish Samphire’s productions. They call attention to her indebtedness to nature-derived forms as a metaphor for process, evolution, growth, and transition. Indeed, Samphire has self-consciously taken this metaphorical sensibility one step further by paying homage to the patterning of nature itself. Works such as Greentail, Swallowtail, Crescentspots, Atala Butterfly, and Fritillaries take inspiration from different species of butterfly whose delicate abstract markings mirror the infinite diversity of their environments.

MORNA TUDOR

Morna Tudor has been active since the mid-1980s as an artist, teacher, and writer. In addition she has served as guest artist at Sheridan College and the Alberta College of Art and Design, garnered numerous national and international awards, and racked up an impressive list of exhibitions in Canada and the United States. Glass sculptures such as Dulce de Decorum Est from her Sphere Series placed a premium on the intimate relationship between viewers and the art work. The Sphere Series contrasted plain exteriors with rich interiors decorated in high temperature enamels and Paradise paints. These works can be cupped in two hands and are intended to be held, tilted back and forth, and carefully examined. In the process, the standard “static” visual experience gives way to temporal contingencies and a slow exploration of the painted interiors.

Tudor’s Sphere Series offers an interesting comparison with the break that the minimalist school of sculptors — notably Donald Judd and Robert Morris — made in the mid-1960s from the premium placed on visual immediacy by Anthony Caro and his high modernist counterparts. Minimalist sculpture could not be taken in at a glance (and often it was impossible to do so). You had to move around and through it to experience it. So, too, with Tudor’s work. Like her minimalist predecessors, she forces temporality and bodily experience into the aesthetic equation, and she does so with a light dash of humour. Her Spheres lack stable bases, so when you touch a work it rocks and sways, as if to say, “time is dynamic and so am I!”

Her latest pieces — richly decorated shallow bowls sporting wide borders in a single colour — are created using graal and incalmo processes. First, a thick egg- shaped glass blank is blown, cooled, and sandblasted. Next, high temperature paints are applied to create the decorative interior. Once dried, the painted graal is heated again and encased in clear glass. The final form — with coloured rim — is then worked up through the incalmo process, an Italian term describing the conjoining of separately blown bubbles and their amalgamation into a single piece. This allows for completely different colour applications as sections of a work are added on. The end result is a shallow bowl with a wide monotone rim demarcated by a narrow inner ring of solid contrasting colour that, in turn, “frames” brilliant swirls of mixed colour and Kandinsky-inspired painterly forms decorating the bowl. In some instances the colour mix in the bowl appears to “lick” the edges of the enclosing ring, suggesting that what first looks like a seemingly crystal-clear demarcation is really a disguise for the glass work’s original, malleable state. This lyrical interplay between solidity and fluidity is a breathtaking tour de force.

GARY BOLT

The third artist in the Starfish triumvirate, Gary Bolt, graduated in 1986 from the glass program at Sheridan College in Ontario. Since then he has served as director of the British Columbia Glass Art Association and as design consultant for the City of Victoria. Along with occasional teaching and guest artist residencies during the past two decades, his extensive exhibition record spans the continent.

Artistically, Bolt is preoccupied with glass’s paradoxical qualities. Glass is a weighty material that, at the same time, is infinitely malleable, transparent, and seemingly ethereal. These are the elements Bolt foregrounds in his sand-cast sculptures which begin as blown glass forms embedded in heavy orbs of molten glass. After cooling, the orb is cut through with a diamond saw and polished to reveal multicoloured solid and linear glass forms suspended within the interior. The technique is rife with possibilities, ranging from the evocation of fossilized oceanic underworlds to the starry expanse above us, or some imaginary play with compasses and rulers on a draftsman’s table. Crystalline and precise, the sculptures are an emphatically “invented” denaturalizations of the real. The smaller sculptures encased in glass look more like drawings or paintings than three-dimensional forms, and yet their three-dimensional qualities are precisely what engross us. Mounted on rotating armatures or resting like a stone or shell whose secrets await discovery, the illusionist tension in Bolt’s work is utterly captivating.

Imagine these three talents working together on a daily basis and you have a hint of what awaits gallery-goers at Starfish Glassworks. More than friends and colleagues, this is a team of artists embarked on a shared adventure who exchange ideas while pushing each other forward to the next challenge.

Allan Antliff, Canada Research Chair in Modern Art at the University of Victoria, is author of Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics, and the First American Avant-Garde (2001) and editor of Only a Beginning: An Anarchist Anthology (2004).