3D - glass

Composition 15

blown gaffa & fused Bulleye glass

2009

500mm x 500mm

Concept

This work teeters between the symbolic and the abstract with its use of binary opposites (black and white, single and multiples) and geometry - sphere and square. The spheres are a metonym for all eggs/seeds, the potential of life. To that end they are arranged in binary growth relationships

as per the Mandelbrot set. The translucent spheres are relatively similar but as with all life they have individuality and are not purely geometric. The obverse to th

e spheres - death, is symbolised by a more purely geometric form, the black square. Unrelenting in its shape (despite ripples and depressions), stark and opaque. The surface undulates to swallow the spheres.

This artwork appears before the viewer in stark black and white using simple binary opposites to evoke the finality of death. It is pared back to be clinical with none of the viscera of life signaling that it re

fers to the psychological transition rather than the physical.

This work also references traditions in art practices that wrestle with transcendence and psychological liminal spaces. The use of white spheres and black square are informed by Piet Mondrian’s use of abstracti

on and Kasimir Malevich’s black square which seek to reach toward a spiritual transcendence. Thus this work is concerned with the fundamental, the essential. It sits between Mondrian’s early abstract work that contained references to nature such as Composition 10 in Black and White: Pier and Ocean and his Composition with Grid (Lozenge).

Physiological in representation and psychological in subject, Louise Bourgeois work explores her feelings about her past, particularly her childhood. She often employs a black and white pallet perhaps to indicate memory not reality or perhaps to disengage her sculptures from the abstracted body parts they reference. Her abstraction is achieved via the use of multiples and simplification of disembodied appendages 1. This work utilises references to body parts - eggs. As with Bourgeois work the deformation in this work is a signal for psychological disturbance and are indicative of issues o

f identity - but identity with a difference. Eggs have a sense of independence, complete in themselves. In this way instead of being focussed on the forming of identity this work is about the loss of identity. Death being the ultimate threat to identity.

1. Louise Bourgeois "Memory and Architecture" (Madrid: Museo Nacional Ceno de Arte Reina Sofia, 2000).