THE VEIL OF TRANSPARENCY AND THE SUBSTANCE OF A FORM
(The Glass Sculpture of Ann Wolff)
There is perhaps no other artistic material or media that is so optically ambivalent as glass. Glass presents a form of delusional enrichment, in which its transparency suggests the ephemeral character of immediate vision, that is often contradicted by the materiality of its weight. It often represents a paradoxical mass and volume that rests alone on the optical hiatus of its material aspects and transparent presence. The elasticity of 'seeing through' and the uncertainties of its mass create in the viewer a specific sensory stimulus that foregrounds the primary and secondary values attached to an object. The primary quality of an object (according to Locke) is the unchanging mass and volume which remains constant regardless of the environmental conditions that surround it. While the secondary quality of an object is usually defined in terms of colour and light, the former being dependent on the latter for the purposes of sensory or perceived experience. Glass thus both obfuscates and clarifies its assimilation, and thence magnifies these experiences regardless of its particular subject matter and/or chosen contents.
Ann Wolff possesses a technical mastery of glass sculpture of long standing, but far more than that she understands the internal emotional characteristics provoked by its properties. These properties have always manifested elemental and sensory contraries, since glass is both an opaque liquid and luminous fluid produced by fire (heat), yet it sets into a solid presence that is its exact contrary. It is produced by flux and flow, but when stabilised it is most often cold or hard to the touch. Thus from the outset the amazing immanence of Wolff's glass sculpture is creatively generated and assimilated through a set of emotional contraries. There is the more obvious optical or the 'seeing' sense born of a form and an idea that Wolff has imagined, and the haptic or 'touching' sense implied by the sculpture's process of making. But similarly a haptic feeling that must be also extended to touch as an imagined and alternative sensory immanence. This is to say her sculptures are haptic in terms of their preliminary technology (haptic technology meaning quite literally the user-maker's interface as touch), and possess by extension a wider haptic perception that is another way of evoking a second type of inferred aesthetic assimilation – to touch with the eyes. This, perhaps not surprisingly, is again strangely paradoxical insomuch as, unlike other sculptural forms, the material foundry processes of pouring or casting molten glass denies the actual or direct use of an artist's hand-applied manipulation. Though clearly the hand elements remain as deferred presence from the modelling and plaster stages of the glass sculpture's development. A further aesthetic tension is thereby set up by another contrary, since the human sense of touch is usually one of expressive warmth (touch is a warm sense), whereas conversely sight is reflectively cool and distancing – a detached contemplative sense that begins by the process of looking. It is as we might understand it in the Kantian sense, the fundamental dichotomy and/or distinction between thought as it might lead to a feeling – that which intellectually evokes and that which is being evoked. This above all it seems to me is why grasping the aesthetic aspects of glass sculpture remains ever mysterious to the viewer. Glass lacks the long historicity of bronze, with which it often shares related foundry-driven processes, and in consequence glass media challenges the viewer to re-think sculpture in a totally different and original way. The issues of form and transparency are thrown open to a different and unique set of material evaluations.
In terms of a glass sculpture's defined form or organic shape Ann Wolff often expresses her contents or subject matter through an extended use of visual doubling. Hence the integrated doppelgänger or ghostly double, the two that is one and the one that is two, self as other, and other that is self, is something that frequently underpins Wolff's expressive artistic strategies. The artist has often spoken of her creative autonomy as being something whereby "My interest in the Self includes Others," and that "…..this Self is guided by constantly developing inner insights." In consequence this has led Wolff to cultivate a strong sense of pro-active self-reflection as regards her artistic practice. The nature of glass and the occasioned mirror contents of its reflection seems therefore an ideal metaphor to use for Wolff's actual procedure, and one that will not be lost upon the reader of her works. In the heavier glass sculpture that she has produced from the mid-90s this self reflexive practice is made clearly evident. In works like andante (2006), lucifer (2005/06) and sepia (2007/08) the artist makes the doubling explicit, either through the use of the full figures, heads, and/or masks as metaphor. The point to be made is less that of an illustrative commitment to the two sides of self (the conscious and the unconscious) as a psychologist might understand it, but rather a sense of artistic co-equality, of the duality of externality and internality at work in Wolff's aesthetic consciousness. As the female figure in andante simultaneously extrudes and enters at the same time, it seems deliberately to evoke a median sense of emotional perception, the very reality of 'andante' that lies between 'adagio' and 'allegro'; the musical simile that builds the aesthetic experience as if by a slowly judged and moderate passage of movement. The work Andante also exemplifies my earlier observations on transparency and weight. I refer to the volumetric and the ephemeral issues whence I began this essay.
There is also a strong female and domestic presence in many of Wolff's kiln cast sculptures of the last fifteen years. A work called des femmes I ( 2000) with its analogous or near pendulous breasts creates a form of visually associative maternal intimacy. Its obvious feeling for sensuous human forms alluding to precarious vessels of containment, and to ancient amphorae, also connotes something of the traditionally sustaining maternal archetype. The artist's own life as both mother and autonomous artist is directly revealed in the intentional paradox of this work of figurative- abstraction. This said there is a further questioning and personal figurative extension of the same idea in works like domus (2005), and stair house (2004), where the female principle challenges issues of the same inhibiting containment "…for our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word." Wolff's own feeling of 'stepping out' and of challenging not only the nature of her contained life as a wife and glass designer in the late 1970s, is perhaps indicated in the work she has called simply step (2007). However, this notwithstanding, it was age-old conventions and limitations that were arbitrarily and historically imposed on glass as a medium, a mere instrument of repetitive reproduction, that has been challenged and undermined by the creative complexity of Wolff's glass sculptures. The hellvi head (2003), perhaps, circumscribed in its vertical and geometric block of glass, reveals an explicit reference to the imprisoned internal self that has become mediated by an external transparent mass. It is another example of Wolff's two-sided part and whole (self and other) approach to glass sculpture, a revealing of the many creative tensions that exist between what lies within and without.
Beyond the volumetric kiln cast sculptures of Ann Wolff, there is yet another distinct and highly expressive vocabulary that is shaped by the vivid interaction between her drawings and glass collages. Focussing on the head and the human body or torso, Wolff exposes the internality of gender. The drawings are largely executed in pastel and charcoal, and the double or sometimes multiple sense of her artistic self is again expressed. Though this must never be confused with a specific sense of self-portraiture, they are intended as portraits of an internal psychical identity, rather than those that illustrate the common means of recognition and identification. The torso figures are frequently vertical and elongated, and question or challenge many of the male stereotypes of the horizontal nude and conventional female depictions. As the drawing materials are frequently imposed on top of one another on a light coloured ground, thereby eliding any defined boundary between line and colour mass, one comes to understand how important these drawings are for the feeding into and developing of Wolff's layered glass collages. From the early 1980s, drawing in fact (as well as extending her earlier sandblasting, or print techniques, and etching on glass) has been central to all of Wolff's creative endeavours. Indeed the role of spontaneous drawing played a vital part in liberating the artist from the glass design orientation of the later 1970s. And, as a result concerning particularly the glass collages, the drawings open out something hitherto not fully discussed, namely the important role played by transparency and colour in the artist's work.
The glass collages of Wolff are usually prepared as three-layered forms of flat coloured and/or clear glass. Reminiscent of a series of optical colour sensations (the artist has long been influenced by many aspects of Cezanne and his 'petite sensations'), figurative faces appear and most often deliberately confront the viewer by making eye contact. Thus there is an explicit sense of the seemingly female heads returning of the gaze, that is to say intentionally inverting the patriarchal hegemony and historical dominance of the gaze. However, unlike the cloisonné of a stained glass window, the layers of glass are placed on top of one another creating an illusion of patterning within an overall transparency effect created as a window that can be seen through. This is particularly evident in a work called ensemble (2004), whose four faces contour lines are calligraphically reduced to a minimal and single rhythm. Though often given names as if they were actual portraits, such as ebba g. (2004) or billy h. (2003) , alina (2005), in the last case only a single layer collage, they are never intended to be as stated specifically identifiable of the person after who they are named. But we often find again the same doubling of faces as in together (2005) or berlin double. The different coloured layers of flat glass, and importantly their distinctly different colour densities, has the effect of creating an added lively sense of optical movement. But there is also a fluidic movement or visual experience in a continual state of change, that is to say something generated by and related to the immediate lighting conditions of the environment in which the art work has been placed.
In earlier discussions of Ann Wolff's work much as been made of the iconography and of various life references that appear in her work; the self-portraiture of Van Gogh, the drawings of Paul Klee, medieval manuscripts and the like. But retreating into biography and iconography cannot (an must not) be substituted for looking and engaging directly with an artist's dominant aesthetic sensibility, and that is one all but totally shaped by the properties of glass. Apart from a series of bronzes executed in the mid-to-late 1990s, Wolff's lifelong commitment has been to glass sculpture (that is following on from her earlier involvements in glass design). As all objects have a necessary material life that is born of form and colour, so too we must be made more aware about how the day to day sensibility of glass shapes all our lives. Whether Ann Wolff is called a glass artist (which she dislikes), or simply a sculptor in glass of three dimensions and relief, is of little substantial importance to our understanding when compared to the art works she produces. Through glass she has allowed the world access to her singular aesthetic sensibility, and through a lifetime's experience of the glass media Ann Wolff has elevated and given new meaning to an art medium that has never been fully assimilated or understood by the wider world of the arts. No other material than glass offers the unique propensity to both allow us to 'see as' and at the same time 'see through', to have extraordinary strength while creating a strangely contrary feeling within us of the frangible and the ephemeral. It is a magical material where the 'sensory contraries' both beguile and deceive. Maybe it is not a coincidence therefore that the historical metaphor of patriarchy and female inhibition is frequently called a 'glass ceiling', and is something that must still be continually challenged by women in our less than equal world. But if it so, it is something in that the crystalline and creative transparency of an autonomous artist like Ann Wolff has long ago challenged and fought against, and in consequence transcended or passed through. And, as a result of her fought for and achieved autonomy, she has been able to cast all such inhibitions aside.
©Mark Gisbourne
03 October 2009
