The range of what's possible in flameworked glass rather than any thematic link was the premise of a recent survey show curated by Carmen Lozar at Illinois Wesleyan University.
Shaping glass at the the torch offers unique potential to render details with a delicacy difficult to achieve in hot-worked furnace glass, or even by casting into molds. The results can range from highly realistic botanical studies, as in the work of Paul Stankard, to the nuanced replicas of discarded plastic bottles in Matt Eskuche‘s trash tableaus. The process of sitting before a flame and heating and reheating borosilicate glass, teasing out details with a tweezers, adding droplets of color, and even blowing vessel forms, gives artists a degree of control and a unique luxury of time to work and rework in glass. Yet flameworking also presents some aesthetic limitations in the colors available in borosilicate (though this is starting to expand) as well as in scale that, in an age when art gallery and museum spaces sprawl, makes diminutive size a potential liability.
All of these issues were clearly on flameworker Carmen Lozar‘s mind when she curated the recent exhibition titled “A Survey of Contemporary Flameworking 2010.” (Though the exhibition closed on February 4th, the catalog can be downloaded as a PDF file here.)
“The exhibition was intended to be a broad overview of what is currently being created in flameworked glass today,” Lozar wrote in a prepared statement. “The artists that I chose to represent in the survey and the works they displayed are examples of the broad spectrum of thought and technique that can be executed at the torch.”
Showcasing the range of work and the variety of ideas in a single medium offers an easy way to organize an exhibition of this type. Lozar argues that such a survey is important given the way that an increasing number of artist working in glass are looking to flameworking for economic reasons.
“Flameworking, often considered the ‘underdog’ of the glass arts, is gaining recognition as being a versatile and cost-effective way to work with an expensive and often limiting material,” Lozar writes. “ Technically, the challenges of flameworking are no less than learning to manipulate glass at the furnace but the range of what can be accomplished with little equipment and monetary investment is calling attention to the field.”
While a showcase of wondrous variety of work made in glass is a time-tested curatorial premise in the field of Studio Glass, it is also testament to the extreme plasticity of flameworked glass in particular, and the almost alchemical process that can create extraordinarily life-like illusions in the material. While such surveys are useful ways of organizing what remains a relatively small field of practitioners, one can’t help but look forward to the day when there is enough strongly sculptural work to organize a show around a more focused theme such as “The Flameworked Figure,” “Natural Studies,” or “Three-Dimensional Line Drawing in Flameworked Glass,” all of which are suggested by some of the individual works in Lozar’s exhibition.
In the meantime, we present a gallery of some of the works in the exhibition.
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