3.2 The Perceptive Landscape
I develop a romantic metaphor of the glasswork as a landscape to demonstrate the availability of glass for affective readings, which in turn could be interpreted as the dynamic projection of our own desires.
A Journey Travelled
One of the landscapes which glass makes available to the viewer maps process. Glass has an extraordinary memory. As Catrina Vignando wrote it “freezes the memory of the maker’s touch”.[1] Seen through the imprint of its making, the glass object is a journey travelled. The bubble or the striation betrays the touch of the hand and the accidents that have occurred. This is the work, not as the immaculate conception of an original thought, but as a landscape formed by the interaction of idea, gesture and material.
A Subjective Reading
A landscape sits upon the glasswork as palimpsest and it reflects the technical processes of its making, but the work has the potential to present a much broader panorama.
"If the gods are there, it is because you have discovered them there, drawn them up out of your soul’s need for them and dreamed them into the landscape to make it shine … They are not outside us, or even entirely within, but flow back and forth between us and the objects we have made, the landscape we have shaped and move in. We have dreamed all these things in our deepest lives and they are ourselves. It is our self we are making out there …" [2]
I took this quote from David Malouf’s novel An Imaginary Life. It unveils a process of imaginative projection in which what we perceive as an objective reading of the land is not objective but subjective. Ruskin christened the term pathetic fallacy to debunk the idea that nature could express human emotions.[3] The pathetic fallacy is derived from romantic allegory, and Ruskin is right, nature does not express human emotion, but we do however project our emotions onto nature. The Romantic landscape expresses the artist’s “intimate and individual response”.[4] Even in contemporary society what we comprehend as landscape is a contextual interpretation in which we place the land we see before us into our own cultural perspective. Landscape is our cultural projection upon the land. It is a reading we have learned as our interpretation, and it is driven by our own sense of reality.
The world reflects back those stories we have imagined to enable us to exist as self-conscious beings. In Hegelian terms “consciousness becomes aware of itself by being aware of objects and then being reflected back into itself from them”.[5]
We need stories because, although our self-awareness is a blessing, it is also a curse. It is a blessing because it gives us our appreciation of all that is around us, but it is a curse because awareness of self separates us from the world. With existential realisation we sense an incomprehensible vastness in our isolation, and it is the stories written deep within us that enable us to survive that eternal space. The landscapes we perceive are constructions. What we perceive as the literal landscape is our cultural representation of country and as such it has, as Stephen Muecke says “aesthetic dimension and political force … Landscape aesthetics work towards the intensification of relationships between the subject and object, creating a sense of belongingness …”[6].
The Glasswork as a Landscape
Glass shares with landscape its availability for our subjective engagement. It is easy to make such a transfer when you read this description of a Turner landscape: “the seas and skies of lambent colour, charged with mysterious energy”,[7] or the Romantic fascination with clouds rising over ridges “like snowy mountains, with lights and shadows playing amid them, as though it were a spirit world of its own”.[8] The ambiguity inherent in the transparency and translucency of glass make it available to the reader’s imaginative projections. Light and colour in glass generate emotive responses just as light and colour do in the natural landscape.
The natural landscape is a major inspiration for Emma Varga who finds she has the same response looking into her glass pieces as she has looking into a landscape that emotionally engages her through its colour and light. [9] She says collectors have spoken of similar responses to her work. Varga said she lives with a world inside her head, sometimes so vivid that she feels she must recreate it with her hands. Karen O’Clery agrees that she might read the form in an object the same way she might read the form and patterns in a shell, a bird skeleton or a rock, and she also agrees that these may be centring responses.[10] Keith Rowe takes his emotional response to a landscape and attempts to recreate that as reaction in the glass he makes. In her work Deb Jones says she wants the same feeling you get when you look at the ocean, that “loving, longing, lost feeling – joyous and sad at the same time”.[11]
Jessica Loughlin sees the reaction that some have to landscape – the stillness and “an incredible sense of quietness and insignificance with something that is vastly beyond us” – and says she seeks that reaction to her glasswork, as “the moment of inner stillness, which occurs when [she] was faced with a vast open space”.[12] Loughlin wants her work to be a vehicle into that mind space of inner stillness, and she reduces reference in her work to eliminate any distraction that may prevent that happening. Loughlin’s notion of reduction pares back all, so you confront your deeper self in vastness. In her exhibition Eyre [13] she writes that her “works are inspired by a landscape transcribed by light, space, memories of water and residues of salt”,[14] and with aesthetic resonance Loughlin evokes that transcendental landscape with her glass-made objects.
Connection with the Numinous
David Blayney Brown quotes American art critic Robert Rosenblum as saying, “An apprehension of the spiritual in the world around us has been among the main legacies of Romanticism”.[15] One element that we project out onto the literal landscape is an element that romantics search for in art, and in reference to this project, what we also search for in glass. Romantics may call it spirit, or the numinous – a need evidenced in a desire to belong that reflects in our relationship to landscape. This does not mean that an artist has to make glasswork with the numinous or transcendence in mind, for the light, the ambiguity and the paradox within glass can put those possibilities forward without the direction of the artist’s deliberate intention.
The constant thread is the desire for connection, the connection with the material, the connection with place, and beneath that, to the deeper connection we desire with the world. Nicolas Bourriaud writes[16] that as an “arena of exchange”, “art is a state of encounter” binding us to the social fabric, but that essence of landscape we read within the ambiguity of a glasswork reveals a yearning that is at our centre, and what we yearn for is greater than ourselves. At the most profound level we desire to touch something beyond the rational, a thing that cannot be contained or restrained. We seek to touch that which is unreachable. We seek Presence, that transcendent invariable point of reference, whether that is God, or Being, or Truth. We seek something beyond the self; something denied to us by our very self-awareness. We seek an unselfconscious union with the world. It is that which is sought in a deep meditation, or the wild seascape, or in a piece of glass. We desire the angel’s arms. We desire the embrace of the angel so we can be lost in that embrace, lost in the self-less flow of that union. This is the romantics’ nostalgic search for the blue flower,[17] that is, the desire to be one with the infinite.
The creative work, like the landscape we read, reads us, as into its openness we project our desire and need. (I use the word ‘reads’ metaphorically. Our interpretation reveals our perspective, and in doing this it reveals something of our inner nature). Glass as a material provides the ambiguity and reactivity conducive to such engagement. The glass object, rather than a being thing, becomes process within the expanding space that its indeterminacy allows. In this process the viewers’ experiences, through their reading of a work, may range from the enjoyment of the work’s formal elements to revelation delivered through the access it provides to their own mindscapes. Cobi Cockburn speaks in terms of her work as a response to landscape – “it is not the pure landscape space I am replicating. I am responding to an open space. I have no boundaries. I am looking and I am able to feel, unrestrained by thoughts. I am out there, able to be at one and sense what it is I am actually looking for”’[18].
We can experience landscape in a work of glass because there is structural logic that enables parallel experience. Though a communication of visual forms, even without actual visual reference to a tree or a mountain, the experience of a landscape can be felt. This is more than a reaction to those images made by chance and conceived in the viewer’s imagination. It is more than our reaction to a face imagined in the flames of a fire, or animals perceived in the amorphous shape of clouds. This is a perception guided by the aesthetic sensibility of the maker. This is the glass object as the created work with its implanted aesthetic triggers acting through its existence over time as a matrix of potentials available to be realised through various contextual readings.
Although the process of the glasswork’s making exists as a palimpsest both on and in the work, it is the ambiguity of glass and the relationship of glass to light that open the glasswork to imaginative projections. The glass object becomes process within its expanding space. Two aspects emerge – the external space of the world and the internal space of the mind, and both are infinite. With both the landscape and the glass object, our imaginative projections are driven by our need for connection. This introduces the numinous in our desire for that which we cannot articulate, something vastly beyond our comprehension. Through aesthetic experience, ambiguity allows a connection between the world and ourselves, as our projection enables us to imagine form within the shifting formlessness of light through glass.
[1] Catrina Vignando, ‘Leaves of Glass’, 56.
[2] David Malouf, An Imaginary Life, New York: George Braziller Inc., 1978, 28.
[3] Blayney Brown, Romanticism, 151.
[4] Honour, Romanticism, 116.
[5] Knox, Hegel’s Aesthetics. x.
[6] Stephen Muecke, ‘A Landscape of Variability’, in Martin Thomas, Uncertain Ground, Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 1999, 45.
[7] Honour, Romanticism, 102.
[8] Ibid., 107.
[9] Eva Czernis-Ryl, Long Reef Emma Varga catalogue, Manly Art Gallery, 2010.
[10] Karen O’Clery, personal interview, 08/03/10, 4.
[11] Deb Jones, personal interview, 19/10/09, 6.
[12] Jessica Loughlin, ‘Quieting 5’, Ranamok catalogue. Ranamok Glass Prize, 2004, 56.
[13] Sabbia Gallery, March 2011.
[14] Jessica Loughlin, Eyre, catalogue. Sydney: Sabbia Gallery 2011.
[15] Brown, Romanticism, 418.
[16] Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (English translation), trans. Pleasance, Simon and Woods, Fronza with Copeland, Mathieu, Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2002, 18.
[17] Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 104.
[18] Charles Butcher and Cobi Cockburn, Personal interview, 18/01/2010, 9.
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I develop a romantic metaphor of the glasswork as a landscape to demonstrate the availability of glass for affective readings, which in turn could be interpreted as the dynamic projection of our own desires.
A Journey Travelled
One of the landscapes which glass makes available to the viewer maps process. Glass has an extraordinary memory. As Catrina Vignando wrote it “freezes the memory of the maker’s touch”.[1] Seen through the imprint of its making, the glass object is a journey travelled. The bubble or the striation betrays the touch of the hand and the accidents that have occurred. This is the work, not as the immaculate conception of an original thought, but as a landscape formed by the interaction of idea, gesture and material.
A Subjective Reading
A landscape sits upon the glasswork as palimpsest and it reflects the technical processes of its making, but the work has the potential to present a much broader panorama.
"If the gods are there, it is because you have discovered them there, drawn them up out of your soul’s need for them and dreamed them into the landscape to make it shine … They are not outside us, or even entirely within, but flow back and forth between us and the objects we have made, the landscape we have shaped and move in. We have dreamed all these things in our deepest lives and they are ourselves. It is our self we are making out there …" [2]
I took this quote from David Malouf’s novel An Imaginary Life. It unveils a process of imaginative projection in which what we perceive as an objective reading of the land is not objective but subjective. Ruskin christened the term pathetic fallacy to debunk the idea that nature could express human emotions.[3] The pathetic fallacy is derived from romantic allegory, and Ruskin is right, nature does not express human emotion, but we do however project our emotions onto nature. The Romantic landscape expresses the artist’s “intimate and individual response”.[4] Even in contemporary society what we comprehend as landscape is a contextual interpretation in which we place the land we see before us into our own cultural perspective. Landscape is our cultural projection upon the land. It is a reading we have learned as our interpretation, and it is driven by our own sense of reality.
The world reflects back those stories we have imagined to enable us to exist as self-conscious beings. In Hegelian terms “consciousness becomes aware of itself by being aware of objects and then being reflected back into itself from them”.[5]
We need stories because, although our self-awareness is a blessing, it is also a curse. It is a blessing because it gives us our appreciation of all that is around us, but it is a curse because awareness of self separates us from the world. With existential realisation we sense an incomprehensible vastness in our isolation, and it is the stories written deep within us that enable us to survive that eternal space. The landscapes we perceive are constructions. What we perceive as the literal landscape is our cultural representation of country and as such it has, as Stephen Muecke says “aesthetic dimension and political force … Landscape aesthetics work towards the intensification of relationships between the subject and object, creating a sense of belongingness …”[6].
The Glasswork as a Landscape
Glass shares with landscape its availability for our subjective engagement. It is easy to make such a transfer when you read this description of a Turner landscape: “the seas and skies of lambent colour, charged with mysterious energy”,[7] or the Romantic fascination with clouds rising over ridges “like snowy mountains, with lights and shadows playing amid them, as though it were a spirit world of its own”.[8] The ambiguity inherent in the transparency and translucency of glass make it available to the reader’s imaginative projections. Light and colour in glass generate emotive responses just as light and colour do in the natural landscape.
The natural landscape is a major inspiration for Emma Varga who finds she has the same response looking into her glass pieces as she has looking into a landscape that emotionally engages her through its colour and light. [9] She says collectors have spoken of similar responses to her work. Varga said she lives with a world inside her head, sometimes so vivid that she feels she must recreate it with her hands. Karen O’Clery agrees that she might read the form in an object the same way she might read the form and patterns in a shell, a bird skeleton or a rock, and she also agrees that these may be centring responses.[10] Keith Rowe takes his emotional response to a landscape and attempts to recreate that as reaction in the glass he makes. In her work Deb Jones says she wants the same feeling you get when you look at the ocean, that “loving, longing, lost feeling – joyous and sad at the same time”.[11]
Jessica Loughlin sees the reaction that some have to landscape – the stillness and “an incredible sense of quietness and insignificance with something that is vastly beyond us” – and says she seeks that reaction to her glasswork, as “the moment of inner stillness, which occurs when [she] was faced with a vast open space”.[12] Loughlin wants her work to be a vehicle into that mind space of inner stillness, and she reduces reference in her work to eliminate any distraction that may prevent that happening. Loughlin’s notion of reduction pares back all, so you confront your deeper self in vastness. In her exhibition Eyre [13] she writes that her “works are inspired by a landscape transcribed by light, space, memories of water and residues of salt”,[14] and with aesthetic resonance Loughlin evokes that transcendental landscape with her glass-made objects.
Connection with the Numinous
David Blayney Brown quotes American art critic Robert Rosenblum as saying, “An apprehension of the spiritual in the world around us has been among the main legacies of Romanticism”.[15] One element that we project out onto the literal landscape is an element that romantics search for in art, and in reference to this project, what we also search for in glass. Romantics may call it spirit, or the numinous – a need evidenced in a desire to belong that reflects in our relationship to landscape. This does not mean that an artist has to make glasswork with the numinous or transcendence in mind, for the light, the ambiguity and the paradox within glass can put those possibilities forward without the direction of the artist’s deliberate intention.
The constant thread is the desire for connection, the connection with the material, the connection with place, and beneath that, to the deeper connection we desire with the world. Nicolas Bourriaud writes[16] that as an “arena of exchange”, “art is a state of encounter” binding us to the social fabric, but that essence of landscape we read within the ambiguity of a glasswork reveals a yearning that is at our centre, and what we yearn for is greater than ourselves. At the most profound level we desire to touch something beyond the rational, a thing that cannot be contained or restrained. We seek to touch that which is unreachable. We seek Presence, that transcendent invariable point of reference, whether that is God, or Being, or Truth. We seek something beyond the self; something denied to us by our very self-awareness. We seek an unselfconscious union with the world. It is that which is sought in a deep meditation, or the wild seascape, or in a piece of glass. We desire the angel’s arms. We desire the embrace of the angel so we can be lost in that embrace, lost in the self-less flow of that union. This is the romantics’ nostalgic search for the blue flower,[17] that is, the desire to be one with the infinite.
The creative work, like the landscape we read, reads us, as into its openness we project our desire and need. (I use the word ‘reads’ metaphorically. Our interpretation reveals our perspective, and in doing this it reveals something of our inner nature). Glass as a material provides the ambiguity and reactivity conducive to such engagement. The glass object, rather than a being thing, becomes process within the expanding space that its indeterminacy allows. In this process the viewers’ experiences, through their reading of a work, may range from the enjoyment of the work’s formal elements to revelation delivered through the access it provides to their own mindscapes. Cobi Cockburn speaks in terms of her work as a response to landscape – “it is not the pure landscape space I am replicating. I am responding to an open space. I have no boundaries. I am looking and I am able to feel, unrestrained by thoughts. I am out there, able to be at one and sense what it is I am actually looking for”’[18].
We can experience landscape in a work of glass because there is structural logic that enables parallel experience. Though a communication of visual forms, even without actual visual reference to a tree or a mountain, the experience of a landscape can be felt. This is more than a reaction to those images made by chance and conceived in the viewer’s imagination. It is more than our reaction to a face imagined in the flames of a fire, or animals perceived in the amorphous shape of clouds. This is a perception guided by the aesthetic sensibility of the maker. This is the glass object as the created work with its implanted aesthetic triggers acting through its existence over time as a matrix of potentials available to be realised through various contextual readings.
Although the process of the glasswork’s making exists as a palimpsest both on and in the work, it is the ambiguity of glass and the relationship of glass to light that open the glasswork to imaginative projections. The glass object becomes process within its expanding space. Two aspects emerge – the external space of the world and the internal space of the mind, and both are infinite. With both the landscape and the glass object, our imaginative projections are driven by our need for connection. This introduces the numinous in our desire for that which we cannot articulate, something vastly beyond our comprehension. Through aesthetic experience, ambiguity allows a connection between the world and ourselves, as our projection enables us to imagine form within the shifting formlessness of light through glass.
[1] Catrina Vignando, ‘Leaves of Glass’, 56.
[2] David Malouf, An Imaginary Life, New York: George Braziller Inc., 1978, 28.
[3] Blayney Brown, Romanticism, 151.
[4] Honour, Romanticism, 116.
[5] Knox, Hegel’s Aesthetics. x.
[6] Stephen Muecke, ‘A Landscape of Variability’, in Martin Thomas, Uncertain Ground, Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW, 1999, 45.
[7] Honour, Romanticism, 102.
[8] Ibid., 107.
[9] Eva Czernis-Ryl, Long Reef Emma Varga catalogue, Manly Art Gallery, 2010.
[10] Karen O’Clery, personal interview, 08/03/10, 4.
[11] Deb Jones, personal interview, 19/10/09, 6.
[12] Jessica Loughlin, ‘Quieting 5’, Ranamok catalogue. Ranamok Glass Prize, 2004, 56.
[13] Sabbia Gallery, March 2011.
[14] Jessica Loughlin, Eyre, catalogue. Sydney: Sabbia Gallery 2011.
[15] Brown, Romanticism, 418.
[16] Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (English translation), trans. Pleasance, Simon and Woods, Fronza with Copeland, Mathieu, Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2002, 18.
[17] Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 104.
[18] Charles Butcher and Cobi Cockburn, Personal interview, 18/01/2010, 9.
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