Cast Glass Sculpture

Artist’s statement (2010)

Starting in the 1980s, I began experimenting with cast glass as a medium for expressing concepts of memory, loss and transcendence. The unique characteristics of the material – the combination of luminosity, mass and a wide range of possible internal colouration and surface texture – enabled me to explore these themes in a very personal way. After initial experimental works in my Montreal studio, I studied glass casting techniques, first with Gene Koss at Tulane University and later with the Czech masters, Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brichtova, at the Pilchuck Glass School in 1989.

I create my cast glass works using the traditional lost-wax method. I make the original sculpture in wax which I shape by hand. I then pour a large mold around this original wax. Once the wax is melted out, the empty mold is packed with glass and placed in a kiln where it undergoes a carefully calibrated heating and cooling cycle which, in the case of some the more massive pieces, can last for one month. I then selectively cut, sand-blast, acid-etch and polish the resulting castings according to what I want from each individual work, including marks or imperfections from the casting process.

For the most part, I work with crystal glass because it “flows” most effectively inside the mold during the melting cycle and thus takes on detail from the mold particularly well. It has a high refractive index and is the “whitest” glass available. It is also most receptive to tooling and cold-working with cutting wheels, abrasives and polishes.

Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

This was my first work in cast glass. I started this series in 1983, when my father died, and continued to expand and develop it for many years as an on-going, memorial. It consists of sculptural groupings that juxtapose natural stones and castings of exact replicas of the same in crystal glass. The identical stone and glass forms constitute inseparable units. The title of the work refers to the relation between the ancient natural stones (ancestors) and the recently created glass replicas (shadows).

10,000 Years of Observation

These eyes, with their non-judgemental gaze, focused on information-gathering, represent the tens of thousands of years that humans have been gazing into the heavens. They represent our cosmic loneliness, search for meaning and inherent need for information, which has motivated us to send rockets and signals into space, to seek knowledge through astronomy, to invent cosmologies and concepts of heaven and to set up complex inter-connected intellectual constructs to search for extra-terrestrial intelligence.

The Smile – Suprematistic Iterations

These large solid crystal pieces are from a series called The Smile – Suprematistic Iterations. Each piece is in the form of a simple pair of voluptuous smiling lips, projecting a calm, centered, self-confidence. I was reminded of the lips of the Buddha statues at Angkor Wat. They are iterations in the sense that they all have the same basic shape and dimensions, but each one represents a slight variation: for instance the color, the surface texture, the thickness, the form of the curve and so forth. I have also exhibited some of them as a grouping – a Cloud of Smiles – which reinforces the sense of calm and contemplation evoked by the individual pieces.

Witnesses

Witnesses consists of a series of solid life-size crystal glass heads that I created between 1998 and 2005. The heads glow from within, illuminated by light sources inside the tall dark base structures. They are intended to be displayed in a space with subdued lighting.

The use of these specific means creates a tangible presence and a charged paradoxical atmosphere where the weight and massive presence of the solid glass contrasts with the lightness and interior luminescence of the head forms.

Although each individual head can be seen as an autonomous work, I also intended them to be displayed as a formal grouping, in which the glass heads look out together across the exhibition space towards a distant focal point.

The work expresses our reaction to the images of horror which we see every day in the media and which we seem powerless to stop. These pure white expressionless heads – “witnesses” – are a physical representation of that frozen and paralyzed state.