OPENING: Delicate glass drapery in Pipaluk Lake’s solo museum show refines (and redefines) slumping

Pipaluk Lake, Framework, 2008. Glass, oxide, steel. (produced at the National Worshops for Arts and Crafts, Gammel Dok Pakhus, Copenhagen.) H 38 1/2, W 66, D 27 1/2 in. photo: anders sune berg

Officially opening Saturday, March 19th, at the Glasmuseet Ebeltoft, a three-hour drive and ferry-ride from Copenhagen, is a solo exhibition of work by Pipaluk Lake entitled “DROPS.” With work combining steel frames and slumped float glass, Lake’s work owes a debt to the intellectually rigorous and trailblazing artwork of Mary Shaffer. Like her predecessor, Lake seems fascinated with gravity and fluid forms. A relentless experimenter seeking new expressive possibilities with the material of glass, the Danish artist brings a delicacy to making visible the forces that have acted upon the glass. By careful mixing of oxides, she is also able to achieve unusual hues of color which are sometimes used in the form of stripes, or create unusual patterning to the glass. “My ideas, the mingling of the materials and their capacity for transforming one another in the hot kiln: this is where my real area of interest lies – at the crossover point between art, craft and science,” Lake writes on her artist Website.

The title of this new exhibition — “DROPS” — functions on several levels. It refers to the verb for letting something fall, and also describes the liquified-shape of many of her gravity-formed works. But the term also connects to Lake’s new focus on sustainability and the concept of the power of small individualized choices to affect larger change. Several the new works for this exhibition have been created at the Danish Art Workshops (SVK) at Gammel Dok in Copenhagen. The results are part of this exhibition that will remain on view through June 13th, 2011, monumental in scale and revealing a highly developed expressive pallette of form and expression.

Pipaluk Lake, Reticular, 2010. H 34 1/4, W 20, D 19 1/2 in.

A Danish native, Lake lives and works in Copenhagen. She graduated from the Design School in Kolding, Denmark in 1988, specializing in textiles and glass, and her work is in the collections of the Design Museum in Copenhagen, the Victoria & Albert in London, and both the Holstebro Kunstmuseum and Glasmuseet Ebeltoft in Denmark.

“Innovation is the driving force in this project of mine,” Lake writes on her artist Website, “the results of which have so far manifested themselves in the form of objects, sculpture, platters, bowls, wall decorations and window modules. Generally speaking, my dogma has more to do with the way I handle the glass than with what might be made of it. During the creative process I tend to ask myself: ‘What if …’ And I see before me a whole host of unexplored possibilities.”

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