Glass-conscious
Three sculptors’ work reflects the current state of glass art
A sculpture made from glass can be a lot of things. It can be opaque or transparent. We can see inside it and through it. A glass sculpture can distort what is inside it. It can reflect what is outside it. It is both fragile and hard.
For sculptor Jerre Davidson, glass also expresses her love of dance.
“Glass is the perfect medium to create a feeling of movement and space,” she says.
Her sculptures and those of George Whitney and Cheryl Wilson-Smith are on show in Shared Consciousness, an exhibition at the Carnegie Gallery.
Each artist has been exhibiting for more than 10 years. Each takes inspiration from nature. And they cast their sculptures in a kiln. After the glass comes out of the kiln, it can be cold-worked; that is, cut, ground and polished.
Davidson, an award-winning artist, creates elegantly sinuous sculptures with a variety of surfaces. Cliffs on the Caithness coast of her native Scotland have inspired some of her pieces. So has dance.
“I attended the Scottish Ballet School in Edinburgh when I was young,” she tells me.
“My initial inspiration comes from either a dance movement or something I see, for example, the texture of a rock face. The relationship of dance to the landscapes is very clear to me and whether the inspiration is rock texture or a dance movement, the goal is the same — to create a spatial rhythm within my work.”
“Awakening,” an amber-toned piece, offers multiple views. It comprises a gathering of uneven rounded shapes that flow and undulate from a base.
From above we see two such shapes flanking a hollow. Some parts are smooth and glossy, others less so. White spots, or granules, look trapped under the surface. A small area of smooth and shimmery glass enlivens the tip of one piece.
“‘Awakening’ is inspired by dance movement,” Davidson explains. “This work strives to create the feeling of a dancer’s movement in glass.”
“This piece is part of a project funded by the Ontario Arts Council that incorporates the motioncapture recording of a dancer’s movement, which is then converted into a computer-aided design program. The movement is then printed on a rapid prototype machine into a 3D model.”
Then she creates a wax copy and casts it in glass.
Compared with Davidson’s style, Whitney’s is more abstract and block-like. He worked with a variety of sculptural materials before tackling glass.
His block-like forms offer four distinct views as we move around them. “Reversal,” a green freestanding work, dramatically slopes at the top when viewed from front and back. We can look inside and see a rounded, roughly textured tubular shape extending from the bottom to near the top. Move to the opposite side and the tube is a hollow.
“Torsion,” a pale blue piece, serves as a reminder of the drawbacks of transparency. Because of where it is placed in the gallery, it reveals a distorted view of an air-conditioning screen behind it. The wall unit contributes a pattern of horizontal lines. This sculpture also reflects what goes on through some gallery windows.
Wilson-Smith’s reliefs and free-standing sculptures are more opaque and include concrete and nails. In “Chance,” a square grey base is topped with thin wafers of frosty glass. A big rusty nail has been driven emphatically through the white glass, making it look as though is in the process of crumbling.
Regina Haggo, art historian, public speaker, curator, YouTube video maker and former professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, teaches at the Dundas Valley School of Art. dhaggo@the spec.com