Untitled Document

Glimmering Gone uses glass to encourage desire, allude to life’s transience, and describe the unattainable.

I and Beth Lipman have taught and lectured collaboratively in Italy, Sweden, and the United States since 2001. Our collaboration has benefited us as coming from different communities greatly, proviided a deeper understanding of cultural similarities and differences and has lead to new ways of thinking about creative processes and relationships.

For the first time in our professional relationship, we are joining together to create Glimmering Gone, an exhibition that asks us to walk into the unknown and take risks by relinquishing each individual’s primary working method, and challenge us as artists to connect despite geographical distance, culture differences and time zones.

The exhibition comprises three vignettes, Memento, Landscape and Artifacts.

Memento will feature an assemblage of colorless, cut, polished and fractured “objects of desire,” some seemingly familiar, some abstracted; all unattainable in their glass encasement.

In Landscape, a path will meander through sculpted clear glass components that hang from the ceiling and rise up from the floor, creating a veritable curtain of glass. Landscape will reference to the pioneering writings and the paintings of Washingtonian Abby Williams Hill (1861-1943).

Finally, in Artifacts, light projections will play over a series of 200 sandblasted white glass components, which will be fractured and embedded into the walls.

In these ways, Glimmering Gone will investigate our connection with nature and collective and personal memory. This exhibition invites me and Beth Lipman to walk into the unknown, take risks by relinquishing each individual’s primary working method, It is a challenging and an exiting process to investigate the collaboration and to connect despite, and perhaps in light of, geographical distances and cultural differences.

Abby Williams Hill (1861-1943) was a painter who together with her husband came to Tacoma in 1889. At the same time Washington became the forty-second state in US. She produced a dozen of landscape paintings as comissions for the railwaycompanies. Her collection is intact which is extraordinary for beeing a railwayartist.

Her work and her personal voice heard in letters and in documentations about her is the red line in the projekt Glimmering Gone. Her work was to represent the landscape and the beauty of the Northwest to make people want to travel to see it. Ypu can see it as a kind of marketing the landscape to tourist but she also had a personal idea about nature.

It is an exiting journey to follow her as a woman in the wictorian era driven to experience the wilderness and grandeur in the landscape. She also tells us a lot about the relation nature/ culture at the time and in the american mind.

Abby is the third part of our collaboration who gives the focus. Her landscapepaintings are the ground for our schetches. Her role in the project tend to grove and a collaboration with The University of Puget Sound is planned in connection to the installation.

Works

Glimmering Gone will include a small room that has a vitrine filled with sculpted clear glass mementos such as a book, eyeglasses, bottle, brush, as well as other less recognizable objects

11,1/2x20x16 Inches

9x20x16 Inches

12 1/2x20x16 Inches

18 1/4x20x16 Inches

A larger room (50’ x 53’) will hold a three dimensional (14’ x 30’ x 25’) landscape made of sculpted clear glass components that hang from the ceiling and rise up from the floor. The landscape will fill approximately half the room and visitors will walk on a boardwalk that meanders the length of the landscape.

Light will play over an additional wall that will have imbedded glass artifacts in white glass.

Ingalena Klenell/Beth Lipman for MUSEUM OF GLASS TACOMA W. USA. OKT 2010