The Art of Glass

Glass is also traditionally used in ornamentation, decoration, craft and tableware but it is still relatively unusual as a medium for sculpture. This year is the United Nations International Year of Glass and to mark it the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds is presenting a major exhibition exploring glass, in its many different forms, as a sculptural material. The show features glass sculptures from 1965 to the present day created by 16 artists including Mona Hatoum, Luke Jerram, Joseph Kosuth, Hew Locke, the De La Torre Brothers, Alexandra Engelfriet, Nicholas Pope and Claire Falkenstein.

“The show has been a couple of years in the planning,” says Clare O’Dowd, the Institute’s research curator. “We did a series of research events at the beginning of last year about fabrication in which we talked to lots of artists and fabricators about what they did and during the process of doing that, I started to come across glass making. Not many artists specialise in it, so quite often if they are making something out of glass it has to be done by a skilled glass maker, following the sculptor’s design. I found the making process and the collaboration between the artist and the fabricator fascinating.”

Inspired by this, O’Dowd contacted the National Glass Centre in Sunderland and began looking at the history of glass in sculpture going back to the mid-20th century. “Glass making itself goes back thousands of years and in Britain right back to Roman times, but it was only really in the 1950s that contemporary artists started working with master glass makers,” she says. “There is one person I was particularly interested in, Egidio Costantini, who founded a glass-makers – he knew the collector Peggy Guggenheim and started working with Venetian artists and others – and he beca me the first fabricant working in modern art.”

Costantini facilitated many collaborations between contemporary artists and master glassblowers and he himself worked with artists such as Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Jean Arp, Alexander Calder and Gino Severini. He started a trend, inspiring many other glass studios around the world to follow suit and begin collaborating with artists on sculptural pieces. “Costantini was a fascinating character,” says O’Dowd. “Because he made these really spectacular things for other people but his name never comes up, nobody has really heard of him.”

The exhibition explores the dynamic between artists and makers and celebrates the important role played by skilled fabricators in the realisation of the sculptor’s vision.

“Glass is a mysterious and wonderful thing,” says O’Dowd. “Alongside its aesthetic qualities, the alchemical and secretive production processes involved in working with glass have rendered it an especially troublesome proposition for sculptors. The sculpture we have on display in this exhibition shows the breadth of ways sculptors have got to grips with the material.”

O’Dowd took an interesting approach to selecting the artworks that appear in the show. “After looking into the making processes, it became clear that glass is quite a challenging material to work with as it is not only one thing, so I started thinking about its three different states – solid, liquid and gas – and they roughly correspond to specific techniques.” Those techniques include cast, moulded or rolled glass, poured, dripped or stretched molten glass and blown glass, with the work selected for the exhibition reflecting that range. “We have loaned a number of pieces from the National Glass Centre and we have found some unusual works from artists like Mona Hatoum, Luke Jerram and Bruce McLean who people might not have seen working in glass before. Many of these artists are not specialists so they are working with fabricators and sometimes asking them to do quite amazing things with the material.”

Many of the pieces subvert expectations of both material and subject matter and because glass has the capacity to be both fragile and robust, the themes that the artists explore are wide-ranging. There are some large-scale weighty pieces which subvert our suppositions about glass. “There is a huge piece by Alena Matejka, Magic Carpets 2004, which is incredibly solid and heavy, it weighs around 80kg and there is another piece by Bruce McLean which is a massive glass head cast from a stone sculpture that he made as a teenager.”

The fragility of glass also means that it can be used to communicate the vulnerability of life. This is particularly apparent in work by Luke Jerram. “He has made magnified representations of microbes in glass which refer to the global impact of diseases such as HIV, Malaria and Foot and Mouth,” says O’Dowd. “The strange thing is that those diseases are terrible but the sculptures are really beautiful, so there is this confounding of expectation in the relationship between what they represent and how it is represented.”

Some of the work is quite political and explores challenging themes. These include Hugh Locke’s Mummy’s Little Soldier based on his research into child soldiers around the world. “It is a hand-blown piece in Murano glass and the back story to the piece is absolutely horrifying and tragic,” says O’Dowd. “There are all sorts of objects draped off it such as amulets and potions that the boys are told will make them invincible. It is a really subversive use of glass. We associate Murano with decorative objects and that association is being undermined by the subject matter.”

There are some unexpected stories behind other artworks on display. “The Del Toro Brothers have produced this extraordinary figure of El Monarca which looks like a decorative object but all their work explores their identity as Mexican-Americans and the complexity of the immigrant experience. The figure they have made is so grotesque and humorous, as well as tackling serious issues, things that are core to their identity.”

O’Dowd hopes that the exhibition will prompt visitors to think about glass in a different, more expansive, way. “I would like people to be a bit surprised, challenged and confounded by what glass can do and I would like them to rethink their preconceptions about it as a material. Because it is everywhere, it seems quite ordinary but artists can do extraordinary things with it.”

A State of Matter: Modern and Contemporary Glass Sculpture is at the Henry Moore Institute, until June 5. Entrance is free. There is also a programme of online events accompanying the exhibition. Details www.henry-moore.org