Spring 2016, new work

7th Floor Gallery, 455 N Park St, Madison WI

This body of work is a set of 5 slices through a story: a timeline that I have spent the last year sifting and winnowing. This story follows an unconventional history of glassmaking in America that is not only purely factory work nor expressive, but a hybrid informed equally by scientific research and whim.  The “Non-Crystalline History”, which I am calling this undocumented History, follows trained hands that used the same movements, tools, and tacit knowledge to create in these seemingly separate worlds. This timeline sits outside the arts and crafts movement and embraces aspects notoriously shunned by its members. These hands and passions eventually led to disparate professions—but not without leaving traces of the mastery, showmanship, and curiosity the fields were founded upon.

This body of work represents my gonzo want to insert myself into this timeline and in these subgroups as a method of discovery. Through this, the goal of the work (and the research) is not purely masturbatory, as the titlepeice implies, but a search for insight into the lost, insulated world and craving to share this rediscovery. I do not want ‘art that resembles research’ but another sort of research where craft engages the haptic brain and more than personal expression is achieved.