2.3 Gesture and Artistic Sensibility
Although technique is integral to the craft narrative, it also facilitates gesture, and gesture delivers one of the more potent narratives contained within any artwork – that of the artist and their sensibility. This is the world as remade through the perception of the artist and engaged through the sensibility of the viewer. Through concepts of authenticity, integrity and the individual voice, this opens the glass object to engagement through Romanticism.
Romanticism perceived a work of art as “the voice of one man addressing himself to other men”.[1] Painter of Romantic landscapes, Casper David Friedrich said: “The artist should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him”.[2] Friedrich’s statement reflects the Romantics’ concern with insight and the creative potential of realising our ‘inner’ landscape. Through technique gesture embeds my voice in the immediate surface of my portraits. Artist Kirstie Rea talks of her own process in the creating of work as finding something that comes from what she calls her core.[3] An artists’ application of medium presents to the viewer a narrative shaped by artistic sensibility, and that narrative speaks of the living experience of the maker. It is possible to recognise consistent narratives that run through an individual artist’s work. These consistent narratives reveal concerns and interests of the artist, and these narratives also reveal something of the artist’s psyche.
The Artist’s Narrative
Although Kirstie Rea’s ideas have evolved through her twenty-three year career, she says they can be brought back to one point, and that is “really about knowing a space”.[4] She says that the ideas expressed though her works have to do with memory, space and a sense of belonging. In her last exhibition, ‘In the Presence of Blue’(at Sabbia Gallery 2010) Rea removed the specifics of location for the first time, telling me it could be anywhere, but “in magical liminal moments of emergence”[5] in her own words, “blue-sky” space remains.
In her work Deb Cocks wants to tell stories that are part and parcel of her life. Summer Sanders’ stories are linked to her people’s country and traditional cultural practices. Warren Langley used glass as a vehicle for what he calls his current “little narrative or obsession of the moment”,[6] but deeper narratives lie in Langley’s restless energy expressed through gesture on form and his interest in landscape, both natural and man-made. For Stephen Procter, whether the surface narrative is technical, as in his early diamond point etching of nature on glass, or formally abstract as in his mature work, a deeper narrative is expressed through light revealing his spiritual and physical progression towards an Eastern aesthetic.[7]
As social animals much of our behaviour depends on how we read each other.[8] In an artwork, the elements of a narrative exist in the traces of human gesture, an antidote to coldness that is symptomatic of an emphasis on technique. Isolating these traces can be as superficial as recognising the favouring of particular themes, or as intrinsic as the evidence of a human touch on material, but they accumulate in the work’s making to become the gesture of the maker.
Gesture
Gesture is marking, and indeed making is a form of marking. In making, what we do is a reflection of who we are and the relationship we have with the material. Making is our doing and that reveals our human condition. Gesture reflects a relationship that we makers now have, and always will have, with that which is made, and this is most evident within the non-conformity of creative endeavour. Sophia Errey expresses this thought when writing of Australian jeweller Robert Baines. “Few are the artists who regard their work as a task unconnected to their innermost being – their personality, individual traits, beliefs and existence in culture and society”.[9]
While it may be possible for one maker to professionally mimic aspects of the work of another, creative making is governed by individual personality and purpose. Our works are evidence of who we are. Indeed glass collector Andy Plummer explained to me that, for himself and for his wife Deirdre, living with their glass collection is like living with little pieces of its makers.
When artistic narrative grows from the genuine expression of a maker’s reaction to life experience, a heuristic gestation of his or her world, then a body of work, as part of a journey of discovery, moves towards being individual and so towards originality. This gives the work nuance[10] as it evolves and changes with the personal development of the maker. The corollary is that in the making of the object the artist may recognise something of his or her self, because that work is part of what they truly are. To a viewer the work can reflect the uniqueness of the maker’s interpretation – the artist’s personal voice spoken in the artist’s own language. In the end the unique thing an artist can proffer in the work is an articulation of his or her own intrinsic qualities.
Artists’ Stories
The power of the work to engage us depends on the capabilities and calibre of the artist and the integrity and intensity of the artist’s gesture. In her fluid and expressionist painting Summer Sanders says she wants to express links to place and family to whom she looks for her cultural identity. Artist Emma Varga feels she could describe herself as body, or as mind, or even as a soul, but says her work is the best description of herself. Glassblower and past president of Ausglass, Keith Rowe, told me he could interpret how he felt on a particular day by looking at the pieces he made on those days.
Making can be the deep narrative of who we are in the world. For example, as Warren Langley spoke to me about the challenges of glass he moved his hands vigorously, and when questioned he spoke of a rough crude quality that emerges in his work and the technologies that he developed to facilitate his quick gestures across a material too hot to handle in its forming. Langley overpowered tradition to impose his gesture on a resistant material, and dynamic gesture distinguishes his work. Tom Moore’s technical virtuosity (developed over years of constant production work) is seamlessly integrated into his unique imagery. Moore turns what could appear a clumsy gag into a narrative work that is accepted as contemporary art by significant institutional galleries (such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, Gallery of Modern Art Brisbane) because his work carries his unique vision of the world. For Richard Clements work has been forty years of play, starting at five thirty in the morning, six days a week, being creatively involved in the process, making decisions as he goes along and being amused by his own quirky visual puns. For Jane Gavan her work is a love affair, in which she is infatuated with idea and material. She says her chosen field is a vocation. Her work is what she calls a core element in her life.
An artist’s commitment marks itself on their work as they evolve their gesture through their struggle with material and come to an understanding through the deep relationship that develops. As Deb Jones says, “You learn and become sympathetic to the material. You think about the material in a deep way”.[11] In fact, this relationship to material is a collaboration. “It is almost like making something with someone else”.[12] Committed makers can do what they do because they have invested time in learning the nature of the material. Their relationship to material is evident in the processes they select in undertaking their journey. Technique facilitates gesture and can be evidence of individuality. Richard Whiteley told me he doesn’t know of many artists working in glass who haven’t developed some aspect of technique in personalising their work.
Gesture and Romanticism
The relationship between artists and their work is much more than the mastery of technique. The expression of that relationship is in the struggle to integrate thought and emotion and to express this through an evolution based in discovery – discovery through doing – in the artist’s dialogue with their material. With an artist like Whiteley, forms may be planned before that physical dialogue is taken up (and that reflects his nature), but when Whiteley works there is a deep understanding of glass and the processes he will use to manipulate that glass in his casting. With the 3D modelling software he incorporates in his processes, Whiteley willingly admits there is still what he called fudging[13] in the manipulation of making. So, while formalism may be ascendant for glassmakers, it is in the struggle with materiality that we go beyond the predictable and the prosaic. Romanticism is definitely evident when Mark Theile suggests that he “approached glass as a medium for his own growth and exploration, as a means to reflect upon and express self”, and that “one’s work could also be one’s spiritual practice”.[14]
Romanticism values sensibility. The term, as I use it, is centred in the search for self, and the idea that the emotional self provides the perspective from which the world is viewed. The world of romanticism is phenomenological. Romanticism is the world filtered through our perception, and it reflects a world formed by our emotional response. In varying degrees, statements which frame practice in terms of ‘internal landscapes’ and ‘revealing self to the world’ flow in an undercurrent of romanticism. Admittedly this is sometimes discretely subdued by Formalism, but then it is often released in an emotive response to material through individual gesture.
Glass Artists and Romanticism
With glass artists approach and motivation vary. Shane Fero, American flame worker and president of the Glass Art Society of America (GAS) at the time I interviewed him, likened his making to a dance that utilises the musicality of glass and process. Stephen Skillitzi sees himself as an eccentric lateral thinker who enjoys playing with glass. For Skillitzi this is a cerebral activity, and he told me that his most creative time is in a part dream state in the very early morning when he is half awake and his mind is in the flow of free association. Klaus Moje works with imagination enabled by skill. He moves from geometry (his structure) into free movement.[15] Moje says there is work he is driven to do (even if it is what he called “irresponsible”) and this is reflected in scale, where larger work grabs him with a different level of passion to the smaller work that he feels “brings the gesture down”. A maker chooses a material because it has qualities that suit his or her artistic character, and artists and makers have materials and approaches they favour. Whiteley wanted dialogue with a material and he said he found this in casting glass. There is compatibility between mind and matter – the qualities of the material and its processes, and the disposition of the maker.[16] Cast glass was a material in which Whiteley felt he could find “satisfactory” expression.
The “effort to express”[17] is common to all art. This is the artist as a creator of phenomena. I use lyrical language, yet it is substantiated by my readings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty who suggests that this world – in which we creative makers are immersed, in which we live, which we see from a viewpoint formed of our experience – is our inspiration.[18] We feel it. Our experience of the world feeds the imagery of our work and furthermore, that work is a compulsion. Charles Butcher says of his art that ‘it is not fun; it is not even “nice” making it. It is laborious and hard. It is taxing on [his] body. Physically and mentally it sends [him] awash, but [he] can’t stop making it’, while Cobi Cockburn says, ‘[She] wake[s] up in the morning and feel[s] compelled to be there and get [her] hands on it. [She is] driven to hold it, to work with it. [She is] daunted by it sometimes. It is definitely overwhelming sometimes, but [she] doesn’t know if [she] could walk away from it’.[19] As Merleau-Ponty says, the creative maker does “what must be done in order to restore the encounter between his glance and the things that solicit it”[20].
The encounter between our glance and the world is a romanticism that implies an internal landscape – a landscape that is the maker’s reading of the world. That internal landscape is tangible as the work, and that enables the world to read its maker. Stephen Procter came close to saying this when he wrote, “Our work is very much part of our contact with life; qualities which express the substance of our living represent that which is alive in us” [21].
What we do reveals how we perceive, because it makes existent our understandings of this world, and conversely, as makers we develop our understanding through the objects we make and so have the chance to know ourselves. This returns to the internal landscape, the landscape of the psyche, a landscape that we as creative makers project into the world by means of our works. That landscape is at the centre of the creative practice. However the artist’s expression requires a vocabulary. For this vocabulary we turn to technique, which at its highest form is embodied, just as speech is embodied. We artists absorb our skill. Through repeated use we build facility and, freed by our technique, we improvise with our material.
Our Making Reveals Our Style
The materiality of glass speaks to us, revealing its substance. Klaus Moje speaks of moments when he can release energy, and of stages when the process is pure meditation. We makers form material as our perception made tangible, often remaking in the struggle to clarify that perception as concept. We attempt through our gesture to integrate emotion and thought into objects made of inert materials in such a way as to trigger an aesthetic response in others. In doing this we reveal our ‘style’.[22] Style is in our gesture as the marks we embed in the material, which we shape into the forms that expand that gesture. We do not choose genuine style as we would a piece of clothing. It does not sit on the surface of us, rather it is intrinsic to what we are, and our action reveals it. We show our style to the world in doing. As our style is evident in whatever we do, the only way to deny our style is to not do.
We build our technical and aesthetic vocabulary from the culture in which we are immersed, and as our world, our culture is absorbed into our way of thinking and feeling. In our creative making we struggle to articulate and clarify a response to the world as we interact with our culture through materials. Our works evolve in flux as every interaction remakes our position. At its best our concept, technique, medium and emotion unobtrusively integrate into our work and present to the viewer as a potential for experience. Material becomes medium and object becomes event, as means transforms into possibility. Our made work flows into the world as an independent entity available to connect and engage as it will. The object has all the potential of landscape to be read by its viewers through their individual interpretations.
Our artistic style is polished by the rub of the world against our doing – our making. Style reveals the ripples of the set of experiences that formed us as makers. In turn, the push and pull of all we have experienced, or will experience, shapes our style by shaping us. Through our gestures we implant messages of our being, then as aesthetic triggers we send them out in our artworks as we would send out notes in a bottle. This is what I do and because it was me who did it, the work will be different from the works of others. In terms of a contemporary romanticism, messages implanted in the work through our aesthetic sensibility reveal us. Therefore it is possible for the maker’s deepest narrative to be deeply embedded as an aesthetic trigger within the creatively made object. There it can subsequently engage as visual form through interpretation by the viewer.
My painted work may appear to have no stylistic link to my cast work, but both bodies of work are driven by intuitive reaction rather than plan. I follow where the medium takes me within the parameters of the specific project. I do not work expecting to resolve into a pre-determined outcome, each work evolves in its own terms. The difference is a result of interaction between the medium, the technique and myself. The portraits evolve out of glass enamels and gesture, whereas the cast work evolves out of the forces of the glass and the casting process. One is carried by the interactions of gesture, the other by the forces of glass and its technical processes. That is why they appear different, but underlining both is my intuitive and evolving response to the medium.
The arguments I present are based in phenomenology and stand relevant to other materials apart from glass. In the next section I will show that glass is exceptional in, among other qualities, its power to take gesture into itself as an expression of artistic sensibility and to amplify its effect in the work.
[1] Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 59.
[2] William Vaughan. Romanticism and Art, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006, 24.
[3] Kristie Rea, personal interview, 19/03/09, 6.
[4] Ibid. 4.
[5] Ann McMahon, ‘In The Presence of Blue’, Craft Arts International no. 76, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2009, 69.
[6] Warren Langley, personal interview, 03/04/06, 4.
[7] Procter and Tazzyman, Lines Through Light, 6.
[8] James Gibson, The Ecological Approach To Visual Perception, London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986,135.
[9] Sophia Errey; Rudiger Joppien, and Judith O’Callaghan, ‘Robert Baines: Metal.’ Living Treasures: Masters of Australian Craft, Sydney: Object: Australian Centre Craft and Design, 2010, 23.
[10] Klaus Moje, “Dance of Colours”. (Floor talk, Sydney: Sabbia Gallery, 2010). Moje used this term when describing his work.
[11] Deb Jones, personal interview, 19/10/09, 3.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Richard Whiteley, personal interview, 10/12/09, 1..
[14] Meredith Hinchliffe, ‘Colour, Pattern & Texture’, Craft Arts International no. 55, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2002, 50.
[15] Moje, “Dance of Colours”, (Floor talk, Sydney: Sabbia Gallery, 2010).
[16] Paul Carter, Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2004. 186.
[17] Michael B. Smith, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Philosophy and Painting. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993, 106.
[18] Ibid.,129.
[19] Charles Butcher and Cobi Cockburn, personal interview, 18/01/2010, 10, 13.
[20] Smith, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 94.
[21] Procter and Tazzyman, Lines Through Light, 20.
[22] Smith, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 90.
Return to contents page
Although technique is integral to the craft narrative, it also facilitates gesture, and gesture delivers one of the more potent narratives contained within any artwork – that of the artist and their sensibility. This is the world as remade through the perception of the artist and engaged through the sensibility of the viewer. Through concepts of authenticity, integrity and the individual voice, this opens the glass object to engagement through Romanticism.
Romanticism perceived a work of art as “the voice of one man addressing himself to other men”.[1] Painter of Romantic landscapes, Casper David Friedrich said: “The artist should not only paint what he sees before him, but also what he sees within him”.[2] Friedrich’s statement reflects the Romantics’ concern with insight and the creative potential of realising our ‘inner’ landscape. Through technique gesture embeds my voice in the immediate surface of my portraits. Artist Kirstie Rea talks of her own process in the creating of work as finding something that comes from what she calls her core.[3] An artists’ application of medium presents to the viewer a narrative shaped by artistic sensibility, and that narrative speaks of the living experience of the maker. It is possible to recognise consistent narratives that run through an individual artist’s work. These consistent narratives reveal concerns and interests of the artist, and these narratives also reveal something of the artist’s psyche.
The Artist’s Narrative
Although Kirstie Rea’s ideas have evolved through her twenty-three year career, she says they can be brought back to one point, and that is “really about knowing a space”.[4] She says that the ideas expressed though her works have to do with memory, space and a sense of belonging. In her last exhibition, ‘In the Presence of Blue’(at Sabbia Gallery 2010) Rea removed the specifics of location for the first time, telling me it could be anywhere, but “in magical liminal moments of emergence”[5] in her own words, “blue-sky” space remains.
In her work Deb Cocks wants to tell stories that are part and parcel of her life. Summer Sanders’ stories are linked to her people’s country and traditional cultural practices. Warren Langley used glass as a vehicle for what he calls his current “little narrative or obsession of the moment”,[6] but deeper narratives lie in Langley’s restless energy expressed through gesture on form and his interest in landscape, both natural and man-made. For Stephen Procter, whether the surface narrative is technical, as in his early diamond point etching of nature on glass, or formally abstract as in his mature work, a deeper narrative is expressed through light revealing his spiritual and physical progression towards an Eastern aesthetic.[7]
As social animals much of our behaviour depends on how we read each other.[8] In an artwork, the elements of a narrative exist in the traces of human gesture, an antidote to coldness that is symptomatic of an emphasis on technique. Isolating these traces can be as superficial as recognising the favouring of particular themes, or as intrinsic as the evidence of a human touch on material, but they accumulate in the work’s making to become the gesture of the maker.
Gesture
Gesture is marking, and indeed making is a form of marking. In making, what we do is a reflection of who we are and the relationship we have with the material. Making is our doing and that reveals our human condition. Gesture reflects a relationship that we makers now have, and always will have, with that which is made, and this is most evident within the non-conformity of creative endeavour. Sophia Errey expresses this thought when writing of Australian jeweller Robert Baines. “Few are the artists who regard their work as a task unconnected to their innermost being – their personality, individual traits, beliefs and existence in culture and society”.[9]
While it may be possible for one maker to professionally mimic aspects of the work of another, creative making is governed by individual personality and purpose. Our works are evidence of who we are. Indeed glass collector Andy Plummer explained to me that, for himself and for his wife Deirdre, living with their glass collection is like living with little pieces of its makers.
When artistic narrative grows from the genuine expression of a maker’s reaction to life experience, a heuristic gestation of his or her world, then a body of work, as part of a journey of discovery, moves towards being individual and so towards originality. This gives the work nuance[10] as it evolves and changes with the personal development of the maker. The corollary is that in the making of the object the artist may recognise something of his or her self, because that work is part of what they truly are. To a viewer the work can reflect the uniqueness of the maker’s interpretation – the artist’s personal voice spoken in the artist’s own language. In the end the unique thing an artist can proffer in the work is an articulation of his or her own intrinsic qualities.
Artists’ Stories
The power of the work to engage us depends on the capabilities and calibre of the artist and the integrity and intensity of the artist’s gesture. In her fluid and expressionist painting Summer Sanders says she wants to express links to place and family to whom she looks for her cultural identity. Artist Emma Varga feels she could describe herself as body, or as mind, or even as a soul, but says her work is the best description of herself. Glassblower and past president of Ausglass, Keith Rowe, told me he could interpret how he felt on a particular day by looking at the pieces he made on those days.
Making can be the deep narrative of who we are in the world. For example, as Warren Langley spoke to me about the challenges of glass he moved his hands vigorously, and when questioned he spoke of a rough crude quality that emerges in his work and the technologies that he developed to facilitate his quick gestures across a material too hot to handle in its forming. Langley overpowered tradition to impose his gesture on a resistant material, and dynamic gesture distinguishes his work. Tom Moore’s technical virtuosity (developed over years of constant production work) is seamlessly integrated into his unique imagery. Moore turns what could appear a clumsy gag into a narrative work that is accepted as contemporary art by significant institutional galleries (such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney, Gallery of Modern Art Brisbane) because his work carries his unique vision of the world. For Richard Clements work has been forty years of play, starting at five thirty in the morning, six days a week, being creatively involved in the process, making decisions as he goes along and being amused by his own quirky visual puns. For Jane Gavan her work is a love affair, in which she is infatuated with idea and material. She says her chosen field is a vocation. Her work is what she calls a core element in her life.
An artist’s commitment marks itself on their work as they evolve their gesture through their struggle with material and come to an understanding through the deep relationship that develops. As Deb Jones says, “You learn and become sympathetic to the material. You think about the material in a deep way”.[11] In fact, this relationship to material is a collaboration. “It is almost like making something with someone else”.[12] Committed makers can do what they do because they have invested time in learning the nature of the material. Their relationship to material is evident in the processes they select in undertaking their journey. Technique facilitates gesture and can be evidence of individuality. Richard Whiteley told me he doesn’t know of many artists working in glass who haven’t developed some aspect of technique in personalising their work.
Gesture and Romanticism
The relationship between artists and their work is much more than the mastery of technique. The expression of that relationship is in the struggle to integrate thought and emotion and to express this through an evolution based in discovery – discovery through doing – in the artist’s dialogue with their material. With an artist like Whiteley, forms may be planned before that physical dialogue is taken up (and that reflects his nature), but when Whiteley works there is a deep understanding of glass and the processes he will use to manipulate that glass in his casting. With the 3D modelling software he incorporates in his processes, Whiteley willingly admits there is still what he called fudging[13] in the manipulation of making. So, while formalism may be ascendant for glassmakers, it is in the struggle with materiality that we go beyond the predictable and the prosaic. Romanticism is definitely evident when Mark Theile suggests that he “approached glass as a medium for his own growth and exploration, as a means to reflect upon and express self”, and that “one’s work could also be one’s spiritual practice”.[14]
Romanticism values sensibility. The term, as I use it, is centred in the search for self, and the idea that the emotional self provides the perspective from which the world is viewed. The world of romanticism is phenomenological. Romanticism is the world filtered through our perception, and it reflects a world formed by our emotional response. In varying degrees, statements which frame practice in terms of ‘internal landscapes’ and ‘revealing self to the world’ flow in an undercurrent of romanticism. Admittedly this is sometimes discretely subdued by Formalism, but then it is often released in an emotive response to material through individual gesture.
Glass Artists and Romanticism
With glass artists approach and motivation vary. Shane Fero, American flame worker and president of the Glass Art Society of America (GAS) at the time I interviewed him, likened his making to a dance that utilises the musicality of glass and process. Stephen Skillitzi sees himself as an eccentric lateral thinker who enjoys playing with glass. For Skillitzi this is a cerebral activity, and he told me that his most creative time is in a part dream state in the very early morning when he is half awake and his mind is in the flow of free association. Klaus Moje works with imagination enabled by skill. He moves from geometry (his structure) into free movement.[15] Moje says there is work he is driven to do (even if it is what he called “irresponsible”) and this is reflected in scale, where larger work grabs him with a different level of passion to the smaller work that he feels “brings the gesture down”. A maker chooses a material because it has qualities that suit his or her artistic character, and artists and makers have materials and approaches they favour. Whiteley wanted dialogue with a material and he said he found this in casting glass. There is compatibility between mind and matter – the qualities of the material and its processes, and the disposition of the maker.[16] Cast glass was a material in which Whiteley felt he could find “satisfactory” expression.
The “effort to express”[17] is common to all art. This is the artist as a creator of phenomena. I use lyrical language, yet it is substantiated by my readings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty who suggests that this world – in which we creative makers are immersed, in which we live, which we see from a viewpoint formed of our experience – is our inspiration.[18] We feel it. Our experience of the world feeds the imagery of our work and furthermore, that work is a compulsion. Charles Butcher says of his art that ‘it is not fun; it is not even “nice” making it. It is laborious and hard. It is taxing on [his] body. Physically and mentally it sends [him] awash, but [he] can’t stop making it’, while Cobi Cockburn says, ‘[She] wake[s] up in the morning and feel[s] compelled to be there and get [her] hands on it. [She is] driven to hold it, to work with it. [She is] daunted by it sometimes. It is definitely overwhelming sometimes, but [she] doesn’t know if [she] could walk away from it’.[19] As Merleau-Ponty says, the creative maker does “what must be done in order to restore the encounter between his glance and the things that solicit it”[20].
The encounter between our glance and the world is a romanticism that implies an internal landscape – a landscape that is the maker’s reading of the world. That internal landscape is tangible as the work, and that enables the world to read its maker. Stephen Procter came close to saying this when he wrote, “Our work is very much part of our contact with life; qualities which express the substance of our living represent that which is alive in us” [21].
What we do reveals how we perceive, because it makes existent our understandings of this world, and conversely, as makers we develop our understanding through the objects we make and so have the chance to know ourselves. This returns to the internal landscape, the landscape of the psyche, a landscape that we as creative makers project into the world by means of our works. That landscape is at the centre of the creative practice. However the artist’s expression requires a vocabulary. For this vocabulary we turn to technique, which at its highest form is embodied, just as speech is embodied. We artists absorb our skill. Through repeated use we build facility and, freed by our technique, we improvise with our material.
Our Making Reveals Our Style
The materiality of glass speaks to us, revealing its substance. Klaus Moje speaks of moments when he can release energy, and of stages when the process is pure meditation. We makers form material as our perception made tangible, often remaking in the struggle to clarify that perception as concept. We attempt through our gesture to integrate emotion and thought into objects made of inert materials in such a way as to trigger an aesthetic response in others. In doing this we reveal our ‘style’.[22] Style is in our gesture as the marks we embed in the material, which we shape into the forms that expand that gesture. We do not choose genuine style as we would a piece of clothing. It does not sit on the surface of us, rather it is intrinsic to what we are, and our action reveals it. We show our style to the world in doing. As our style is evident in whatever we do, the only way to deny our style is to not do.
We build our technical and aesthetic vocabulary from the culture in which we are immersed, and as our world, our culture is absorbed into our way of thinking and feeling. In our creative making we struggle to articulate and clarify a response to the world as we interact with our culture through materials. Our works evolve in flux as every interaction remakes our position. At its best our concept, technique, medium and emotion unobtrusively integrate into our work and present to the viewer as a potential for experience. Material becomes medium and object becomes event, as means transforms into possibility. Our made work flows into the world as an independent entity available to connect and engage as it will. The object has all the potential of landscape to be read by its viewers through their individual interpretations.
Our artistic style is polished by the rub of the world against our doing – our making. Style reveals the ripples of the set of experiences that formed us as makers. In turn, the push and pull of all we have experienced, or will experience, shapes our style by shaping us. Through our gestures we implant messages of our being, then as aesthetic triggers we send them out in our artworks as we would send out notes in a bottle. This is what I do and because it was me who did it, the work will be different from the works of others. In terms of a contemporary romanticism, messages implanted in the work through our aesthetic sensibility reveal us. Therefore it is possible for the maker’s deepest narrative to be deeply embedded as an aesthetic trigger within the creatively made object. There it can subsequently engage as visual form through interpretation by the viewer.
My painted work may appear to have no stylistic link to my cast work, but both bodies of work are driven by intuitive reaction rather than plan. I follow where the medium takes me within the parameters of the specific project. I do not work expecting to resolve into a pre-determined outcome, each work evolves in its own terms. The difference is a result of interaction between the medium, the technique and myself. The portraits evolve out of glass enamels and gesture, whereas the cast work evolves out of the forces of the glass and the casting process. One is carried by the interactions of gesture, the other by the forces of glass and its technical processes. That is why they appear different, but underlining both is my intuitive and evolving response to the medium.
The arguments I present are based in phenomenology and stand relevant to other materials apart from glass. In the next section I will show that glass is exceptional in, among other qualities, its power to take gesture into itself as an expression of artistic sensibility and to amplify its effect in the work.
[1] Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 59.
[2] William Vaughan. Romanticism and Art, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, 2006, 24.
[3] Kristie Rea, personal interview, 19/03/09, 6.
[4] Ibid. 4.
[5] Ann McMahon, ‘In The Presence of Blue’, Craft Arts International no. 76, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2009, 69.
[6] Warren Langley, personal interview, 03/04/06, 4.
[7] Procter and Tazzyman, Lines Through Light, 6.
[8] James Gibson, The Ecological Approach To Visual Perception, London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1986,135.
[9] Sophia Errey; Rudiger Joppien, and Judith O’Callaghan, ‘Robert Baines: Metal.’ Living Treasures: Masters of Australian Craft, Sydney: Object: Australian Centre Craft and Design, 2010, 23.
[10] Klaus Moje, “Dance of Colours”. (Floor talk, Sydney: Sabbia Gallery, 2010). Moje used this term when describing his work.
[11] Deb Jones, personal interview, 19/10/09, 3.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Richard Whiteley, personal interview, 10/12/09, 1..
[14] Meredith Hinchliffe, ‘Colour, Pattern & Texture’, Craft Arts International no. 55, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2002, 50.
[15] Moje, “Dance of Colours”, (Floor talk, Sydney: Sabbia Gallery, 2010).
[16] Paul Carter, Material Thinking: The Theory and Practice of Creative Research, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2004. 186.
[17] Michael B. Smith, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Philosophy and Painting. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993, 106.
[18] Ibid.,129.
[19] Charles Butcher and Cobi Cockburn, personal interview, 18/01/2010, 10, 13.
[20] Smith, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 94.
[21] Procter and Tazzyman, Lines Through Light, 20.
[22] Smith, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, 90.
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