mold-blown glass, cold-worked
The clear vacuum formed packages that keep salads fresh and display children’s toys are the point of departure. The discarded containers collected from family and friends are both hyper-visible and invisible. Their shapes shift in and out of sight according to their function or accumulation. Intertwined with our everyday experiences they are placeless, abundant, ungrounded and everywhere.
These hard shapes are combined into sculptures resembling multi-form bodies or volumes. A plaster mold of the sculpture is made, into which glass is blown: the resulting glass vessels become a representation of the empty mold. There is a physicality to this labor-intensive process that engages chance, where breath pushes glass into the strangeness and limits of shape. The vessels seem to gesture. They lean. They slump. Their form communicates. Some pieces have protruding textured forms, like parts of a body or growths. Some look carved or indented, while others resemble boxes. They are uncommon objects that do not value function.
Questions related to corporeality, value, intimacy, vulnerability and permanence arise from the associations attached to materials, the way in which the container is engaged metaphorically and how the massive body of objects in surrounding environments are engaged. Possibilities of what exactly shapes can hold are examined and how abstraction becomes a map of absence and a possible path to intimacy.
