Glass is always full for Ione Thorkelsson

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/04/2015 (4162 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A few years ago, online magazine The Week compiled 29 of the most succinct answers to the complex question: what is a human being?

The answers ranged from the profound (“The only animal for whom his own existence is a problem” — Erich Fromm) to the practical (“An ingenious assembly of portable plumbing” — Christopher Morley). But they could have easily added a 30th pithy answer: “creatures easily seduced by the property of light.”

We are suckers, it seems, for anything that shines and is transparent. Many of us are drawn, like moths to a flame, towards the beautiful and metaphorical characteristics of glass.

This Friday at the Winnipeg Free Press News Café, renowned Manitoba artist Ione Thorkelsson will tell the Art Talk/Art Walk audience how she became entranced with glass and how she “followed the material” into a unique and unlikely art career.

Thorkelsson began working with glass in the early 1970s after becoming captivated by a glass display at Expo 67 in Montreal. She took a three-week course in glass-blowing at Sheridan College in Toronto, rushing home to begin her own work. She converted an old chicken coop into a studio, made a furnace out of bricks and began melting down scrap window pieces.

In her own words, she had no idea what she was doing. She was just a “giddy young enthusiast” who wanted to find a way to play with this “glorious material.” She struck out on her own, experimenting with techniques and chemistry. There were no precedents to follow. The studio glass movement had barely begun.

Today, the movement has evolved to include a wide variety of techniques and disciplines. In the 1990s for example, Thorkelsson’s work shifted to include sculptural cast work.

Winnipeggers may remember her 1998 Winnipeg Art Gallery show The Unwilling Bestiary, in which Thorkelsson created a fantastical world of hybrid creatures. Translucent wings, spiky vertebrae and gnarled bird’s feet, all made from cast glass, were fused to hollow spheres. Each creature was exquisite, ethereal and altogether unsettling. It was almost as though they could, at any moment, step down from their podiums and scuttle — on sets of slender glass legs — across the gallery floor.

Many Winnipeggers might also know her installation of glass wings, titled Incoming, suspended from the ceiling on the second floor of the Richardson International Airport terminal.

There is much to be said for the experience of being moved and impressed by art made with an obvious mastery of skill; the sort that only comes with devotion to a material over long and arduous years. There is even more to be said for experiencing art that doesn’t require a novella-length artist statement to facilitate understanding. Thorkelsson’s work contains emotion, beauty and wonder — three things often exiled from contemporary art — and it connects, almost immediately, with viewers.

Thorkelsson’s work is intelligent too, proving that materially skilled art, better known as craft, can be just as effective a vehicle for concepts as conceptual art, which is perceived to be higher up on the artistic totem pole.

It could be argued that Thorkelsson, in her attitude to art, has something in common with Canadian painter Mary Pratt. Pratt famously eschewed the chilly conceptualism that was common in her day, choosing instead to follow a warmer, more personal kind of artistic vision. In Thorkelsson’s case though, the glass always comes first.

Concepts arise later, after rigorous technical experimentation.

“I often ask glass to do something it would rather not do,” says Thorkelsson with a laugh.

At the Art Talk on Friday, Thorkelsson will speak about where she situates her practice, inside what she calls the “forbidden middle zone between art and craft.”

Audience members will also view images from her new exhibition, Synthia’s Closet, which shows until May 14 at the Byward Market Gallery in Ottawa.

For the past number of years Thorkelsson has made work that responds to disturbing discoveries in synthetic biology, namely a self-replicating, minimal-bacterial genome dubbed Synthia. The work is, according to Thorkelsson, “an unscientific person’s response to science.”

For the Ottawa show, she has made a roomful of spherical glass objects, each housing bones or feathers as well as the intricate, translucent parts of junk electronics mined from dismantled dollar-store products.

The glowing objects are seductive and vaguely ominous. They speak about the frightening power we have to permanently alter the natural world. And they challenge even the most far-fetched expectations for what the material of glass can accomplish.

 

Sarah Swan is an arts writer and educator. For tickets to this event, please call 204-697-7069.