‘Glass Sculptures’
— Nix Thérèse
I can’t be the only one who gets emotional when encountering tinted glass. Sunlight drifting through stained glass windows & dyeing a body with swatches of color, a car’s blackened glass that offers the safety to be tousled, the smooth but matte seaglass that’s found underfoot… all of these moments deposit me right back into my body, into consciousness. When I encountered these stunning glass sculptures evoking the sea through manipulated blue glasses, I became similarly arrested.
‘The Diver’ gives us a suspended vision: they’re both breaking in and coming out, both solidly there in bronze and ghostly glass. I’m fascinated by how the body seems to slim when pushed into the blue, the water seemingly lapping their figure away. The squared-in space also calls to mind a tank, and it’s in this that I realize how humanly designated spaces are grasps at comfort & control that don’t save us from the variable of pain or accident. Going into a space believing that we know all its capabilities is sometimes the fastest recipe for failure, and yet leaving that nagging sense that something could go wrong also disturbs. I feel this tension in the body of the diver, one half flowing towards the unknown & one kept without.
My eye was also drawn to ‘Longing’ where two figures are on opposing rocks with a deluge of water locked between them. If dry, the divide could be bridged one long rock slide down and then a climb-up, but the water makes this impossible. You must address the sea spanning between, maybe just by seeing it. I enjoy how the waves in the rock are almost exact on each side but not quite, one breaking a bit more than the other, one person a bit harder to approach. Only one sea (or one relationship) can be caught here, but the asymmetrical spill feels apt; a emotion can be carried differently.
But I’m still drawn most to the tints: the turquoises, royals, mints that render the concrete icy, sharp, and even delicate when under them. These hard-appearing materials combine to sometimes create such soft, winding drops. The unexpected lightness that appears continues to hook me—a blue dropping multiple shades across a piece or the dark broken by white tops—because even the endlessly cohesive water finds a way to shift.