Luminous Form

Januarry 22 - 29, 1998

[Art Reviews]

Alchemy

Glass masters shine at the Providence Art Club

by Bill Rodriguez
LUMINOUS FORMS. An invitational glass exhibit featuring works by Tina Aufiero, Bruce Chao, Nicole Chesney, Daniel Clayman, Michael Glancy, Tracy Glover, Peter Ivy, Michael Scheiner, Jim Watkins, and Steve Weinberg. At the Providence Art Club through January 23.

"Verge," by Daniel Clayman

Maybe it's because light -- the lifeblood of glass art -- is as elemental as air, but a work made of glass can readily seem spontaneous, breezy. Like the wind whipped it up.
However, as Susan Gordon is here to tell you, pursuit of that spontaneity sure needs a lot of dogged persistence.
Take blown glass, for example. The way it captures motion like a Japanese sumi-e ink drawing, the way it thrusts out color to you like a bouquet, effortlessly.
"It takes seven years, on the average, to become halfway proficient with glass-blowing," Gordon informs me. The curator of Luminous Form, the glass show at the Providence Art Club through January 23, is in the gallery to await and uncrate the works as they arrive.
Near the door are copies of the Art Now Gallery Guide. On the cover is a color photograph of "Verge," by Daniel Clayman, a piece in the show that involved casting glass as well as bronze. The technique, Gordon says, can be as equally demanding as blowing glass, however simple the process might seem if you've ever cast lead sinkers in a mold.
"With this glass casting method of Clayman's, his work reflects more than 10 years intense, intense labor every day," she explains. "He's really a master.
"Cast pieces are very problematic. The glass may not fill -- similar to bronze casting, it can freeze up. The mold can fall apart," Gordon adds.
Part of what we perceive when a work in glass catches our eye is its fragility. With good reason.
"Inherent in the medium are stresses that are taken out by annealing but not always totally," she points out. Annealing is the process of strengthening glass or metal by tempering it with heat, then slowly cooling it. Trouble is, the different ingredients may need to cool at slightly different rates. "There's something called compatibility that can cause a beautiful piece to explode as soon as it cools down to room temperature."
Even the first step of melting glass to work with isn't as simple as tossing some broken bottles or a bucket of sand into a furnace. Sand off the beach doesn't melt until it reaches 3250[[ring]]F, twice the temperature at which glass is cast. (The surface of the sun is about 10,000[[ring]]F.) So some kind of flux is needed, as when you melt solder. This adds impurities that require other chemicals, so the whole witch's cauldron can end up belching out toxic fumes.
We've all seen photographs and films of glass-blowers with puffed cheeks sweating over white-hot furnaces, so we know that's hard work. Gordon has done it all, from arranging Byzantine mosaics to firing sheet glass until it slumps into a mold. She teaches glass blowing at the Massachusetts College of Art, in Boston, where the Cranston resident is a visiting lecturer. She also runs Holland Galleries, in Warwick.
"When you start working with glass, you follow the glass," Gordon says of the various techniques. "You get to a certain point and you control the glass, bend it to your will. And then you get to another stage where the glass is pushing you but you're nudging it back."
Gordon has kept coming back to glass from the moment that she discovered the medium as a high school student. A 1976 grad of Rhode Island School of Design, in glass and film/video, she got her MFA at RISD in glass in 1994.
Bruce Chao, head of the glass department at RISD, is represented in the show by a photograph of a piece that is in Japan. He's a leading proponent of using glass sculpturally. "There are other programs that have this approach, but none with the kind of rigor that RISD offers," Gordon says. "Bruce is a wonderful educator. He's been a big influence on a lot of really good artists."
Another nationally noted influence on her has been DClayman, with whom she has worked as an assistant in his Rumford studio and also as a teaching assistant at the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington state. Gordon's acquaintance with prominent glass artists came in handy for the Luminous Form show. Michael Glancy is widely known for a technique he devised and uses to impressive effect -- electroplating bronze on glass. He had only two works on hand that he was willing to relinquish for the duration of an exhibition -- and the Smithsonian Institution had just requested three. But when Gordon called to request a piece for her show, he didn't disappoint her.
Gordon notes that glass is a paradoxical medium, which intrigues people. It can be as delicate as a tea cup or strong as a translucent building block; as precious as lead crystal or as common as soda pop. Which all adds nicely to its mystery.
"It's pretty alchemical, making glass," as she puts it.