CONSTRUCTIONS: ARTIST’S STATEMENT (1996)

MIXED MEDIA CONSTRUCTIONS

I have always been fascinated by the visual qualities of glass as a medium of expression. The effects of transparency, translucence, refraction, and reflectivity enabled me to play with light itself while at the same time working with a very physical, tangible and beautiful material. After years of creating glass panels – windows – with increasingly complex and three-dimensional inclusions (prisms, lenses, antique lantern slides, metal objects), I found that I was thinking in more and more sculptural terms. I started combining glass with other materials in abstract sculptural constructions that were no longer confined to the flat panels of my previous work.

CUBIC TRANSFORMATIONS

After years of making complex sculptures and glass panels with many layers of reference, I turned my focus onto one of the most basic geometric shapes: the simple cube – unencumbered by references and using pure uncoloured crystal glass. The specific idea was to develop a series of works starting from this basic form and explore its permutations and combinations.

This was to be a series based on the global massing of the cubic blocks, with close attention paid to the geometric relationship of planes and angles, i.e. to purely sculptural concerns. Ironically, though, I found that the pure geometric form of the cube, far from being unencumbered by references, has always been deeply fascinating to humans. It demonstrates our ability to create and understand geometry. In its echoing of natural crystalline forms, it brings to mind the spectacular visual effects resulting from the action of molecular and atomic forces. Its perfection represents order, operating in opposition to the apparent chaos of existence in general.

In this series, I chose to define the forms of these glass sculptures with “closed” surfaces (i.e. translucent but not transparent), enabling the work to be read as a solid shape which seems to glow from within, rather than with “open” surfaces (i.e. transparent) through which the eye can travel. This keeps the visual interest of the viewer on the geometry and massing of the pieces, rather than on such aspects as refraction, reflection and surface polish.