OPENING: Scottish museum highlights treasures of permanent collection with contemporary work it insp

Rachel Elliott, Leverets, 2011. Float glass. H 4, W 2 3/4 in. (each piece) courtesy: scottish glass society

It’s a problem many museums face: not enough room to display the thousands, sometimes millions, of objects in their collections. To circumvent this, the Perth Museum and Art Gallery (PMAG) in Perth, Scotland, will host “Trove,” an exhibition of contemporary works from 25 Scotland-based artists inspired by pieces in the museum’s reserve collection. Drawing from items in all departments, including painting, photography, social history, design, and natural history, the artists selected objects as varied as a vulturine guineafowl and a 13th-century mirror case depicting the legend of Tristan and Isolde as the basis for their new works.

Emma Butler-Cole Aiken, Searching, 2011. Fused, painted glass. H 17 1/4, W 18, D 12 in. courtesy: scottish glass society

Animals emerged as a popular theme and figure prominently in works by Emma Butler-Cole Aiken, Junko Eager, Rachel Elliott, Carrie Fertig, and June Morrison. While Morrison created a green cast glass owl for The Guardians, Aiken fused and painted three bird forms after viewing the vulturine guineafowl in PMAG’s natural history collection. The range of blues in Searching mimics the species’ cobalt feathers around the neck and black and white spangled body; additional patterns emerge by viewing the work at different angles. Along with birds, rabbits both large and small inhabit the exhibition, courtesy of Elliott. She created a warren of small leverets (young hares) from float glass along with a large hare entitled Glare that she cut with a water jet before screen-printing kiln-fired enamels of images by Magnus Jackson of Victorian-era Perth onto it. She documented the process in a public Facebook album.

In an interview with the GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet, Elliott described her interest in the exhibition’s unique theme. “I come from a long line of hoarders and collectors, so it was the privilege of being able to browse someone else’s epic stash that was most intriguing,” she said.

James Dennison-Pender, Grandad as the Puppet Master, 2011. courtesy: scottish glass society

Artists like James Denison-Pender, Alexander Galloway, and Jeff Zimmer drew more from literature and myths than the taxidermy animals in PMAG’s collections. Denison-Pender, who specializes in stipple engraving, contributed Grandad as the Puppet Master. The composition and tones of the work parallel those of William Hogarth‘s didactic, moralizing engravings from the 18th century. Galloway and Zimmer looked to the stories of Prometheus and Tristan and Isolde, respectively, while creating pieces for the exhibition. Zimmer read medieval versions of the legend, looked at illuminated manuscripts, and listened to parts of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” as research for The Wake of the Hero, a collaged lightbox with 13 layers of enamelled, engraved, and sandblasted glass.

Jeff Zimmer, The Wake of the Hero, 2011. H 16, W 21, D 14 1/2 in. courtesy: jeff zimmer

Other artists travelled back in time through science, including James Maskrey, whose glass bottles of “Spruce Beer” and “Manuka Beer” grew from Cook’s journals and conjure up imagined beverages from Cook’s first trip to Australia and New Zealand. The playful, imaginative pieces contrast sharply from the more serious subject matter in Herbarium, in which Siobhan Healy depicts glass plants rooted in a Victorian plant sample collection. Healy, who is particularly interested in rare species of plants, uses glass to highlight the fragility of the plants.

Siobhan Healy, Herbarium, 2011. Glass, mixed media. photo: ian marshall and siobhan healy

PMAG collaborated with the Scottish Glass Society for “Trove.” For more information on talks and workshops organized around the exhibition, visit their Website.

—Grace Duggan

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