3.4 What is it in the Glasswork that Engages our Attention?
I explore elements that facilitate our attention being drawn into engagement with the glasswork. I specifically address light, the qualities of ambiguity, transparency, reflection and refraction, and sensitivity to movement and pattern. I analyse the physiological and psychological characteristics that bind our reaction to glass with romanticism.
As both maker and as viewer, if we deeply engage with a work we do so because it makes a connection with our psychological need. Yet before this need engages with the glasswork is there something that draws our attention?
We are a body in relation to the world, assessing and utilising two poles of our perception – the subjective and the objective – in a continuing process of dynamic balance between our action and our relationship to our surroundings.[1] In regards to this, James Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Perception focuses predominately on the nature of human perception and how, with an assumption of the dominance of vision, information about the environment is delivered to the mind. For Gibson, the world is interpreted through an optic array,[2] and it is our brain’s sensitivity to disturbance in the structures of this array that informs us of the world. Disturbance is what occurs when light strikes glass and delivers information to the eye.
Light
Light has our attention, and our perception is the act of attention.[3] Light is the natural companion to studio glass, because glass facilitates the dynamic interplay of light. Working with glass has been referred to as working with a solid form of light.[4]
When Greg Piper is commissioned to take portfolio photographs of glasswork,[5] he feels his technical challenge is to apply light to the object to engage either its transparency or its opacity. Piper looks to capture what he calls the “sparkle”[6] that gives life to the work at a specific point in time. Stephen Procter wrote that, “the power and radiance of light mattered above all else”. Procter used glass “because it was the medium closest to, and most responsive to light”.[7] Glass transmits light, but for Jessica Loughlin, it is how light and glass interact, “how glass holds the light”; and as Dr Gerry King stated, “The way light reacts with glass is everything”. Light penetrates glass and gives it dynamism. Through light the glass object resonates with time, as captured light affects change on that object through morning to night.
Evidenced in the glass object, this interaction between material and light is a process, which converts material into medium, as through light glass transcends its matter. There is a tradition of using the transcendental quality of light through glass. For Steven Procter the interaction between glass and light is spiritual. He wrote that for him, “pure light expressed infinite thought, the dynamic cord between the internal and the external” and his work “was a celebration of light”.[8] A powerful effect can be built out of nothing but light and colour,[9] – an experience understood through the body standing within that light. Light allows glass to physically expand into its surrounding environment and envelop the viewer, to engage him or her both physically and psychologically in an emotive experience. The emotive quality of light and our response to it through glass has long been written about. Quoting Geoffrey Edwards from his The Art of Glass, “Abbot Suger (c.1081-1151), the visionary patron of the abbey church of Saint-Denis in Paris, believed that stained glass windows could render the spiritual palpable by casting a divine light over the congregation”[10].
Richard Whiteley told me it was the colour of refracted light pouring through stained glass windows and onto a church floor that began his fascination with glass when he was a young choirboy. Artist Cedar Prest commented that with her stained glass she is creating an effect, and in this she feels as if she were a stage lighting designer creating an experience. In this creation of experience the work expands beyond the confines of object/plinth to be felt within the body. As is evident with medieval stained glass windows, glass was observed as achieving that long before the birth of the contemporary studio glass movement. In his pursuit of the effect of light on glass, Australian studio glass pioneer Warren Langley moved beyond glass. His remote-source polycarbonate installations using fibre optics and light, (such as Ingress at The Concourse in Chatswood, New South Wales), and his Touching Lightly on the old chimney tower at the Canberra Glassworks, make large internal spaces or facades of buildings emanate light. This escalation of scale was a path trodden by American sculptor of light James Turrell in accessing the transcendental from an ancestry in minimalism. There are other international contemporary artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Dan Flaven, and Bjorn Dahlem, who utilise light installations for sculptural and architectural effect, but who are not studio glass artists. However, their practice informs us once again of the emotive potential of our medium. Glass has a way of holding light, light creates ambiguity and shifting patterns in glass, so glass attracts our attention. And light provides the stimulus that feeds us information about the world as it moves from objects onto the photoreceptors of the retina[11] and that, as the basis of our sight, has our attention.
And the object does need our attention if it is to function as an artwork. Judi Elliott speaks of her initial disappointment when, neglecting to look up, city workers walked under her ten 900 mm by 900 mm tablets of brightly coloured glass (newly installed as a commission in a Sydney office foyer).[12] An artwork may be a large-scale blaze of colour mounted in stainless steel created to the highest artistic and technical standard, but if it does not gain our attention, it has no relevance to us, even though for its maker, or for others, it may be significant.
Movement in the Pattern
In our development as a species, attention to movement has been a matter of instinct, because primordially sudden change in pattern is potentially prey or predator. The shifting in a pattern is a fire that holds the fascination of comfort and the fear of destruction. Light shifting in refraction through, and reflection off glass creates a visual event, and a visual event was (and for humanity instinctively remains) a matter of survival. An example lies in the ‘glittering reflections’ about which Noris Ioannou wrote.
We learnt to expect that the environment is, to some degree, consistent in its provision of elements that help or hinder our survival. We have expectations that objects and events around us behave in consistent ways and those objects and events function dependably in the cost-benefit transactions of our living. Holding these expectations we are sensitive to pattern, and desire to assess, fix and register the identity of any pattern against our experience of the world. Ambiguity within a pattern intrigues us, triggers our interest; makes us curious to the nature of that pattern and what that pattern may deliver. Shift or movement in that pattern has our special attention and therefore engages us, because our survival depends upon recognising the patterns of the world and reacting to disturbances in those patterns.
Confusion of Boundaries
We bring an expectation of how things are into every situation. We expect solids to be substantial and opaque. Where one expects that a surface should not permit the penetration of light, translucency draws one in. When glass, as a solid, allows light to penetrate, it confuses the boundaries between substance and medium, and in this glass creates paradox. Paradox is contradiction, an uncertainty, and it draws attention to itself, as does movement in pattern.
It is a matter of human physiology that our peripheral retina is sensitive to motion and shifts in brightness.[13] As light shifts across and within the object, it becomes a sequential transformation of the pattern, a changing pattern. As light shifts through the glass, glass becomes a shifting array,[14] which is a key element in our perception of the world. In this way object becomes event, and has our attention. As seen in the recent works by American glass artist Jon Kuhn, this effect may be as superficial as glitter, but it can be more substantial in its engagement. For example, artist Denise Higgins uses light and sound through glass to deepen or still people’s sense of time. For Higgins there is a transcendental quality in the way glass manifests light and she revealed that for her, light is essential stuff of the universe and being.
The Stagger
An artwork succeeds when it can hold your attention. Ross Gibson said, the work succeeds if it has you “still thinking, still feeling”.[15] Light or movement can attract our attention, but a work will need more to hold that attention. Resolution in an art piece may evidence the artist’s competence, but competence should not close our engagement.
In this engagement the changing visual array has its counterpart in the work’s conceptual impact. Ross Gibson comments that impact is “incompleteness in rhythm of continuity” and in the “stagger” that holds him engaged. For Gibson this is the sense that the artwork holds more than there is in him and it may be worth his while to spend time with the artwork, because he feels himself alter, intensify, or expand somehow. As Gibson put to me, “It’s resolved, but what it puts in train is endless and that’s really good art”. It is then that we are affectively engaged.
As viewers we are the subjects in the engagement. There are physiological and psychological characteristics within us that will facilitate and drive our engagement with the glasswork. These are linked to the dominance of our vision in the way we perceive the world. They include our sensitivity to pattern, particularly to disturbance or movement in pattern, as well as our sensitivity to a pattern’s ambiguity. This leads to a confusion of boundaries and the awareness of paradoxes.
However, beyond our initial attraction to the work, it will be the work’s conceptual impact that will hold our engagement, and that impact will be dependant on the work’s openness in generating interpreted meaning that is emotionally affective for the viewer.
[1] Gibson, The Ecological Approach To Visual Perception, 126.
[2] Ibid., 107.
[3] Ibid., 149.
[4] Tony Hanning, ‘Nick Mount and The Poetics of Work’, Craft Arts International no. 76, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2009, 36.
[5] A professional photographer used by a number of glassmakers to create portfolios of their work.
[6] Greg Piper, personal interview, 17/08/09, 3.
[7] Procter and Tazzyman, Lines Through Light, 6.
[8] Ibid., 16.
[9] A comment made by Dan Klein,Tina Oldknow, Dan Klein, ‘Richard Whiteley’, catalogue. Canberra, 2009, 14.
[10] Edwards, Art of Glass, 53.
[11] Gibson, The Ecological Approach To Visual Perception, 56.
[12] Judi Elliott, personal interview, 11/12/09, 3.
[13] Richard Wright and Lawrence Ward, Orienting of Attention, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, 7.
[14] Gibson, The Ecological Approach To Visual Perception, 150.
[15] Ross Gibson, personal Interview, 01/12/09, 5.
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I explore elements that facilitate our attention being drawn into engagement with the glasswork. I specifically address light, the qualities of ambiguity, transparency, reflection and refraction, and sensitivity to movement and pattern. I analyse the physiological and psychological characteristics that bind our reaction to glass with romanticism.
As both maker and as viewer, if we deeply engage with a work we do so because it makes a connection with our psychological need. Yet before this need engages with the glasswork is there something that draws our attention?
We are a body in relation to the world, assessing and utilising two poles of our perception – the subjective and the objective – in a continuing process of dynamic balance between our action and our relationship to our surroundings.[1] In regards to this, James Gibson’s The Ecological Approach to Perception focuses predominately on the nature of human perception and how, with an assumption of the dominance of vision, information about the environment is delivered to the mind. For Gibson, the world is interpreted through an optic array,[2] and it is our brain’s sensitivity to disturbance in the structures of this array that informs us of the world. Disturbance is what occurs when light strikes glass and delivers information to the eye.
Light
Light has our attention, and our perception is the act of attention.[3] Light is the natural companion to studio glass, because glass facilitates the dynamic interplay of light. Working with glass has been referred to as working with a solid form of light.[4]
When Greg Piper is commissioned to take portfolio photographs of glasswork,[5] he feels his technical challenge is to apply light to the object to engage either its transparency or its opacity. Piper looks to capture what he calls the “sparkle”[6] that gives life to the work at a specific point in time. Stephen Procter wrote that, “the power and radiance of light mattered above all else”. Procter used glass “because it was the medium closest to, and most responsive to light”.[7] Glass transmits light, but for Jessica Loughlin, it is how light and glass interact, “how glass holds the light”; and as Dr Gerry King stated, “The way light reacts with glass is everything”. Light penetrates glass and gives it dynamism. Through light the glass object resonates with time, as captured light affects change on that object through morning to night.
Evidenced in the glass object, this interaction between material and light is a process, which converts material into medium, as through light glass transcends its matter. There is a tradition of using the transcendental quality of light through glass. For Steven Procter the interaction between glass and light is spiritual. He wrote that for him, “pure light expressed infinite thought, the dynamic cord between the internal and the external” and his work “was a celebration of light”.[8] A powerful effect can be built out of nothing but light and colour,[9] – an experience understood through the body standing within that light. Light allows glass to physically expand into its surrounding environment and envelop the viewer, to engage him or her both physically and psychologically in an emotive experience. The emotive quality of light and our response to it through glass has long been written about. Quoting Geoffrey Edwards from his The Art of Glass, “Abbot Suger (c.1081-1151), the visionary patron of the abbey church of Saint-Denis in Paris, believed that stained glass windows could render the spiritual palpable by casting a divine light over the congregation”[10].
Richard Whiteley told me it was the colour of refracted light pouring through stained glass windows and onto a church floor that began his fascination with glass when he was a young choirboy. Artist Cedar Prest commented that with her stained glass she is creating an effect, and in this she feels as if she were a stage lighting designer creating an experience. In this creation of experience the work expands beyond the confines of object/plinth to be felt within the body. As is evident with medieval stained glass windows, glass was observed as achieving that long before the birth of the contemporary studio glass movement. In his pursuit of the effect of light on glass, Australian studio glass pioneer Warren Langley moved beyond glass. His remote-source polycarbonate installations using fibre optics and light, (such as Ingress at The Concourse in Chatswood, New South Wales), and his Touching Lightly on the old chimney tower at the Canberra Glassworks, make large internal spaces or facades of buildings emanate light. This escalation of scale was a path trodden by American sculptor of light James Turrell in accessing the transcendental from an ancestry in minimalism. There are other international contemporary artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Dan Flaven, and Bjorn Dahlem, who utilise light installations for sculptural and architectural effect, but who are not studio glass artists. However, their practice informs us once again of the emotive potential of our medium. Glass has a way of holding light, light creates ambiguity and shifting patterns in glass, so glass attracts our attention. And light provides the stimulus that feeds us information about the world as it moves from objects onto the photoreceptors of the retina[11] and that, as the basis of our sight, has our attention.
And the object does need our attention if it is to function as an artwork. Judi Elliott speaks of her initial disappointment when, neglecting to look up, city workers walked under her ten 900 mm by 900 mm tablets of brightly coloured glass (newly installed as a commission in a Sydney office foyer).[12] An artwork may be a large-scale blaze of colour mounted in stainless steel created to the highest artistic and technical standard, but if it does not gain our attention, it has no relevance to us, even though for its maker, or for others, it may be significant.
Movement in the Pattern
In our development as a species, attention to movement has been a matter of instinct, because primordially sudden change in pattern is potentially prey or predator. The shifting in a pattern is a fire that holds the fascination of comfort and the fear of destruction. Light shifting in refraction through, and reflection off glass creates a visual event, and a visual event was (and for humanity instinctively remains) a matter of survival. An example lies in the ‘glittering reflections’ about which Noris Ioannou wrote.
We learnt to expect that the environment is, to some degree, consistent in its provision of elements that help or hinder our survival. We have expectations that objects and events around us behave in consistent ways and those objects and events function dependably in the cost-benefit transactions of our living. Holding these expectations we are sensitive to pattern, and desire to assess, fix and register the identity of any pattern against our experience of the world. Ambiguity within a pattern intrigues us, triggers our interest; makes us curious to the nature of that pattern and what that pattern may deliver. Shift or movement in that pattern has our special attention and therefore engages us, because our survival depends upon recognising the patterns of the world and reacting to disturbances in those patterns.
Confusion of Boundaries
We bring an expectation of how things are into every situation. We expect solids to be substantial and opaque. Where one expects that a surface should not permit the penetration of light, translucency draws one in. When glass, as a solid, allows light to penetrate, it confuses the boundaries between substance and medium, and in this glass creates paradox. Paradox is contradiction, an uncertainty, and it draws attention to itself, as does movement in pattern.
It is a matter of human physiology that our peripheral retina is sensitive to motion and shifts in brightness.[13] As light shifts across and within the object, it becomes a sequential transformation of the pattern, a changing pattern. As light shifts through the glass, glass becomes a shifting array,[14] which is a key element in our perception of the world. In this way object becomes event, and has our attention. As seen in the recent works by American glass artist Jon Kuhn, this effect may be as superficial as glitter, but it can be more substantial in its engagement. For example, artist Denise Higgins uses light and sound through glass to deepen or still people’s sense of time. For Higgins there is a transcendental quality in the way glass manifests light and she revealed that for her, light is essential stuff of the universe and being.
The Stagger
An artwork succeeds when it can hold your attention. Ross Gibson said, the work succeeds if it has you “still thinking, still feeling”.[15] Light or movement can attract our attention, but a work will need more to hold that attention. Resolution in an art piece may evidence the artist’s competence, but competence should not close our engagement.
In this engagement the changing visual array has its counterpart in the work’s conceptual impact. Ross Gibson comments that impact is “incompleteness in rhythm of continuity” and in the “stagger” that holds him engaged. For Gibson this is the sense that the artwork holds more than there is in him and it may be worth his while to spend time with the artwork, because he feels himself alter, intensify, or expand somehow. As Gibson put to me, “It’s resolved, but what it puts in train is endless and that’s really good art”. It is then that we are affectively engaged.
As viewers we are the subjects in the engagement. There are physiological and psychological characteristics within us that will facilitate and drive our engagement with the glasswork. These are linked to the dominance of our vision in the way we perceive the world. They include our sensitivity to pattern, particularly to disturbance or movement in pattern, as well as our sensitivity to a pattern’s ambiguity. This leads to a confusion of boundaries and the awareness of paradoxes.
However, beyond our initial attraction to the work, it will be the work’s conceptual impact that will hold our engagement, and that impact will be dependant on the work’s openness in generating interpreted meaning that is emotionally affective for the viewer.
[1] Gibson, The Ecological Approach To Visual Perception, 126.
[2] Ibid., 107.
[3] Ibid., 149.
[4] Tony Hanning, ‘Nick Mount and The Poetics of Work’, Craft Arts International no. 76, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2009, 36.
[5] A professional photographer used by a number of glassmakers to create portfolios of their work.
[6] Greg Piper, personal interview, 17/08/09, 3.
[7] Procter and Tazzyman, Lines Through Light, 6.
[8] Ibid., 16.
[9] A comment made by Dan Klein,Tina Oldknow, Dan Klein, ‘Richard Whiteley’, catalogue. Canberra, 2009, 14.
[10] Edwards, Art of Glass, 53.
[11] Gibson, The Ecological Approach To Visual Perception, 56.
[12] Judi Elliott, personal interview, 11/12/09, 3.
[13] Richard Wright and Lawrence Ward, Orienting of Attention, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, 7.
[14] Gibson, The Ecological Approach To Visual Perception, 150.
[15] Ross Gibson, personal Interview, 01/12/09, 5.
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