Editor's Letter
by Andrew Page
An American artist based in England, Danny Lane made his name for the punk aesthetic of his glass designs, disrupting the smooth perfection of glass through aggressive live edges orawkward metal appendages. In the 1990s, he started building up layers of water-jet-cut float glass to monumental scale, creating roiling walls to transform public spaces into undulating environments. Though his edgy designs stand in the V&A in London and the Corning Museum, Lane was trained as a painter and came to England in the 1970s to study with stained-glass legend Patrick Reyntiens. Never content with a single style or direction, he has started directly carving mold material, and casting it in glass. The edginess is there in the gestures of the energetic carving, but they are captured in translucent relief , yielding large blocks of glass that don’t tame the artist’s peripatetic energy but enshrine it.
In an interview with Gabriela Iacovano, Lane discusses his need to keep breaking new creative ground. Glass contributor Sarah Lippek introduces us to the unique art practice of Monica Cook, who has embraced glass as a new way to reveal her subject, visually permeating surfaces to get to their literal and metaphoric insides. Cook meticulously crafts objects that divulge life’s essential truths, filtered through an uncanny imagination that conjures simian creatures with intriguing anthropomorphic relationships, vehicles made of found objects that bristle with poignant symbolism, and otherworldly contraptions mixing organic textures and shapes undergirded by mirrored glass skeletons.
Artist Tina Aufiero, until recently the artistic director of Pilchuck, interviews the creative director of Laguna B, Marcantonio Brandolini D’Adda, who was so inspired by the unique Pilchuck energy, he partnered with Aufiero to bring international artists to work with Muranese masters to take on the environmental and regulatory threats to the future of the glass economy there.
Emma Park journeys to Denmark’s Glasmuseet Ebeltoft to take the measure of American artist John Moran, who uses the lifelike rendering possible in glass to shock his viewers out of complacency and consider some of the most pressing issues of our day. Not only does he focus us on international crises, Moran also wants to reveal the cynical messaging that manipulates us into accepting gross injustice and brutality in the world
Finally, Shane Fero discusses the unique vision of Cesare Toffolo, who grapples with centuries of tradition in his native Murano as he advances the possibilities of flameworking with innovative ways of working while honoring the past masters in the world capital of glass.