Floating Gates

Why do we install decorations on our walls?

In order to be able to live out of a passion, there is a need for customers and viewers. This is why, as creative makers, we have to be aware of the message we want to share, of the meaning of our creations.

My intention is to give an understanding that glass is a fluctuating material, it’s changeable and soft when we work with it. I am also looking for a visual expression that pushes the boundaries of perception.

Thinking and imagining by ourselves is what makes us humans.

Creating glass artifacts that awake the senses of the viewer, push imagination or give a little respite from reality is important to me.

Walls can be a symbol for separation, for setting up boundaries but also for protection. In anyways, it’s an architectural structure which frames your vision’s area. I don’t want to break that framing, I’ll rather play with it to make it interactive.

The technique I’m using has always been an ornamental technique for decorating glass. It consists in creating murinis and placing them together before fusing them.

I’m inspired a lot by painting in general. I’ve been looking at the similarities I can find between glass and paint. In my opinion, everything is about their properties as a material.

Glass is hot and moving, while the paint is watery and sketching. When glass is cold, it’s static, when the paint is dry, the job is done. With glass and paint, we find their liquidity, their viscosity as one of the properties that makes them workable.

And what better way to represent liquidity than with a drop or a big splash?

This question I asked myself at the beginning, is representative of the soul of this project. An idea that seems simple, clear, and naïve. But when you think it through, it’s not innocent.

A splash is a mistake: you don’t anticipate it, it just happens.

«all creativity, wether it is the work of an artist or the scholar or even the politician, contains within it, a deep rooted hostility to the system as it is. On that account, creativity is mad, it is criminal, but it’s also divine. Human society would have died out long ago if it were not for the fact that there have always been inspired individuals who were prepared to break the rules»

On one hand, I think that you don’t need to be prepared, you just do it and if you really are creative, you won’t even realize you are breaking rules.

On the other hand, I agree with the idea that creative thinking might find its genesis in a feeling of antipathy to the system. Here is my way to give the meaning of my own practice.

Working on a splash is ironic. Ooops, it splashed, sorry! Well now it’s there, so I’ll just leave it on the wall if you don’t mind…

I’m not looking to be provocative or aggressive, I rather wish to seduce through visual expression in order to discuss and bring forth questioning.

My belief is that art and also crafts, both combined, can allow us to free our minds from the negative aspects of the world we live in. I think it can help us to escape for a little while. This perspective is both cynical and calling for hope.

Every picture in this presentation was taken by Kirstine Autzen. Video by I DO ART.