| Phillip Baldwin Monica Guggisberg |
| Philip Baldwin Monica Guggisberg |
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| June 14 2012 - Aug 31, 2012 |
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Philip Baldwin and Monica Guggisberg are vessel-makers, and it is vessels, in all the permutations and possibilities, that are at the core of the Boats series. While Baldwin and Guggisberg do not exclusively make vessels, any survey of their work will show them as amongst those contemporary sculptors in glass who regularly explore glass's long relationship with functionality, who work as heirs to the great tradition of the creation of objects for everyday use. If they are heirs, and if they are interested in acknowledging the forms - especially the vase - that have intrigued artists who work in glass for the last several thousand years, they are heirs who seem driven both to echo and extend.
Part of what draws sculptors to glass as a medium is its special relationship with light and colour, and Baldwin and Guggisberg have well leaned the poetics of its many mysteries and possibilities. Light not only illuminates the exterior of a glass sculpture, as it would one made of bronze or marble, it can enter glass and often passes through it somewhat changed by that journey, and glass can be fabricated in every nuance of translucence between opaque and transparent. And colour. It is one of the most curious traditions of Western art that sculpture is usually left in the colour of its material, presented in pallid tones of marble and stone or the ruddy browns andoranges of bronze, etc. But glass can be coased into any shade at all; it is the painter's palette in three dimensions, and Baldwin and Guggisberg in the Boats series employ colour to make their vessels cluster in tonal families. These artists assign colour so that their boats are only rarely grab-bags of disparate hues; they prefer to focus on a particular chromatic theme or rapport.
James Yood
an excerpt from
Baldwin Guggisberg Beyond Glass
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