Linking Contexts: Emma Woffenden -
Exhibitions and Supporting Texts 1994-2002
Introduction
Over the last decade Emma Woffenden has developed a reputation as one the most intriguing artists working with Glass today. This exhibition provides a unique opportunity to view how the work has developed over this time and also an insight into how Woffenden has often responded to site-specific contexts. The exhibition is divided into sections relating to specific themed exhibitions and concerns of the artist at that time. It is also accompanied by extracts from articles and catalogues by curators and key commentators on the Applied Arts - as well as by statements from Woffenden herself.
Emma Woffenden first worked with Glass in 1981 at West Surrey College of Art and Design. She later spent time working as a glass engraver - pursuing an interest in painting and drawing before returning to post graduate study at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1991. Whilst at the RCA she returned to working in three dimensions, using mould and free blown techniques to explore aspects of the body as metaphor through sculptural Glass pieces.
Since then she has gone on to develop a substantial reputation both in the UK and abroad. Many public collections have examples of her work: The Victoria and Albert Museum, Broadfield House Glass Museum, The Crafts Council and Ernsting Glass Museum. Emma has also worked as a designer and was a founder of TransGlass, a design collaboration with Tord Boontje. She recently curated 'Solid Air', a Crafts Council exhibition, focusing on contemporary Glass.
|
'Works for 94' - Crafts Council Gallery, London, 1994
'Works for 94' was a follow up exhibition to 'The new spirit in craft and design', a Crafts Council exhibition which had looked at work produced in the affluent late 80's. Linda Theophilus head of exhibitions at the time wrote:
Our aim was to look at the issues affecting young makers in the early recessionary 90's through the eyes of the makers themselves. To make this as representative as possible we invited makers from all over the country to send us slides of their work. 15 candidates were finally selected from over 500 entrants.
Extract from 'Works for 94' catalogue.
ISBN 1-870145-28-3. Crafts Council. Jan 1994.
Woffenden wrote about this group of objects:
The ideas come partly through the process of making and mostly through other influences, which become thoughts, often connecting to words, and then become objects. For example, I studied a gothic Pieta. Removed the Virgins knees it became a floating figure, the gesture of bending over backwards, the attitude to please, the meaning of retortion, a glass retort, a verbal retort, a reply or answer, a speech bubble, a bent bubble, a phallic form; upturned it becomes embryonic, the completed form looks unformed, an opening, a hole like a mouth makes a vase, holds a flower, makes an object concealing its history.
I think about gripping hands and handles, hooks and claws, contact, cradling and intertwining, a knot, and make a glass to drink form.
There are many diverse and connecting influences. A group of New Guinea stone sculptures stand alive and silent, bold in their geometry. Islamic carpets have another abstraction, full of physicality, appealing to our senses of movement and touch through the visual sense. Yet it is ordered pattern.
Expressive ideas become formal and refined. These are qualities of loaded simplicity. They define my aims, they are essential and clear.
Extract from the 'Artist's statement' for 'Works for 94'
ISNB 1-870145-28-3. Crafts Council. January
1994
Title: 'Apparatus' |
Title: 'Bite' |
'Objects of our time' - Crafts Council Gallery, London, 1996
'Objects of our time' was a large, group, mixed discipline, show curated by Martina Margetts.
The exhibition themes, discussed later in this essay, explore function, materials and technology, the abstract and figurative image, and personal and political identities in current crafts...
In exploring the nature of contemporary crafts and their position within our visual culture and commercial world, my proposition is that the crafts, over a generation, have moved from margins of meaning and production to occupy an integrated position with fine art, fashion, architecture, and industrial design.
Extract from, 'Objects of our time' catalogue essay
by curator Martina Margetts. Crafts Council.
ISBN 1-870145-63-1. December 1996
Woffenden's work was not immediately picked up by commercial galleries and proved hard to sell. An 'Urban Glass' article, the first in-depth writing on her work, was both clarifying and encouraging.
There is something at once alluring and disconcerting in Emma Woffendens works. The forms, monochromatic and truncated, suggest an emphatic presence, yet also an absence. Her works are tactile and animated and yet Woffenden continuously explores an intangible condition of non-existence, a primordial, pre-birth state that immediately connects her work to Jungian psychoanalytic theory and to Zen Buddhist's timeless, spaceless state of nothing. Her works are paradoxical and complex within a deceptively simple skin.
Works such as Pulse and Breath exemplify these thoughts, in which expansion and contradiction of the body's actions parallel feelings about the self in the world and about relationships. Pulse is relaxed, passive, while the bell jar form in Breath, entrapping like a lung, induces a paradoxical sense of active panic and measured calm.
Bite suggests tense communication between two 'mouths' people. Alert, Woffenden says, is full, about being awake, while Pulse is very much about being asleep.
Extracts are from a 5 page article on Woffenden's
work by Martina Margetts . Published in Urban Glass
Magazine. Spring 1996. P.36-41
|
Title: 'Pulse' |
Exploring the Body
Between 1996-1998 Woffenden began to work on a larger scale and moved on from tabletop sized objects. This resulted in large lost wax castings and slumped constructed pieces. At the same time, 'the body' was of great interest to curators - leading to Woffenden producing work for three different exhibitions on this theme:
- 'Embody' - The Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland 1998.
- 'Before Birth, the art and science of life in the womb' - The Welcome Trust, London 1998.
- 'Only Human' - Crafts Council, London, 1999
Curated by Ann Fletcher, 'Embody' was primarily a glass show - although the performance artist Francoise Sergy was commissioned to work collaboratively with Emma Woffenden. Aesa Thorsteindottir worked with projections and Anna Norberg made small melting electric chairs. 'Before Birth, the art and science of life in the womb' linked medical imaging to different artists work. 'Only Human' curator, Martina Margetts, described the figure as a psychological site and brought together a broad range of works including Erzsebet Baerveldt's video 'Pieta', temple flags from Haiti, and animation by Jan Svankmajer. In total 18 exhibits, including photography, glass, ceramics and jewellery formed this content-based show.
Woffenden said of the work her work for 'Only Human':
The glass forms are based on human gesture or outlines. Combined with the use of a process and material I try to express a thought or human condition. The pieces are pared down and abstracted, an ambiguity and the use of universal symbols or expressions hopefully allow the viewer a full and personal impact.
Groups of objects are sometimes arranged to evoke places and situations. The familiar chair or table humanise the glass pieces, in other pieces the workbench equates to, an operating table, the place it was made. Extract from the 'Only Human-an exhibition about body and soul' catalogue.
Crafts Council. ISBN 1-870-145-860
See also 'Embody' Catalogue published by Northern Gallery
for Contemporary Art. 1998 ISBN 0-905108-37-x
Title: 'Castings table' |
Title: 'Bud on a chair' |
Title: 'Baton' |
Breaking the Boundaries
'Breaking the Boundaries' at Gracefield Art Centre, Dumfries, Scotland, 1999 was a three person show of works by Tim Morgan, Nayan Kulkarni and Emma Woffenden, curated by Clair Phillips. At this time there was (and still is) a great interest in boundary-crossing shows mixing into a broader culture. This exhibition brought together visual artists from different contexts/backgrounds who have used glass both conceptually and sculpturally. During 1997, Woffenden created her first tableau piece - 'Incident', a mixture of found and made objects for a show called 'Touching matters'. The 'Naked' installation was part of a series of such works.
I enjoy unlikely connections that create paradox, and ambiguity which provokes more than one interpretation. The content of a piece can be complex but I aim to capture a simple clarity, a loaded simplicity. Diverse influences result in distilled forms and chaotic installations.
The installation Naked creates a sense of place and event through the arrangement and display of a group of objects. I want the objects to have a context outside themselves. Through using melamine boards and a table in the work I aim to enhance the 'realness' of a situation.
Extract from exhibition statement by Emma Woffenden
Solo Shows
In Spring 1998, Barrett Marsden Gallery, the premier London venue for the Applied Arts became Woffenden's representing gallery and offered her a first solo show. This show was further extended at the National Glass Centre, Sunderland, UK in an exhibition curated by Ann Fletcher. This featured many more pieces including early works and reconfigured tableau - responding to the different architectural space. This was the first National Glass Centre exhibition to focus on a single artist.
Looking at these new works for Emma Woffenden's first solo exhibition, I 'see feelingly' (a phase from King Lear). I became conscious that glass can be both flesh and bone. Woffenden has used almost every kind of process glass offers and in this exhibition the shapes and surfaces appear at once soft, animated, fecund, and muscular, calm, hard. It is as if flesh and bone take on female and male identities fused in each piece: an androgynous body of work, works around the body.
Woffenden is aware of 'the impact of the physical exertion', the pleasure of the necessary collaboration with friends to do 'this epic thing', and the science: the glitter of glass is anathema to her, since 'the material is so much science not nobility. The level of concentration you have to hold on to with the science side is immense. We're continually analysing in this workshop, refining firing schedules, slumping techniques, moulds. If you get one thing wrong, you've lost it'. The engineering and chemistry of glassmaking in a studio context is developing all the time and Woffenden senses that, 'glass had fed into my life' and that she is 'going deeper into the material'. It is this commitment which gives her work an authority and presence in each of the differing arenas for art, craft and design in this country.
The reason for Woffenden's sculptures and design work (TransGlas with Tord Boontje) resonating across visual culture now is partly explained by her topical view of beauty and her insistent union of art and life. Her definition of beauty is 'sunlight illuminating raindrops on a discarded sheet of polythene in the street' and this unpretentious 'reality thing' explains her use of found props as display, as context for her objects. The rhetoric of modernism, of white cubes, of idealisation and controlled rationality, is antipathetic to her purpose. She wants to relate her forms to places people live and work in, heightening our perception and experience of the everyday and reality, not removing us from these.
Extracts from 'Emma Woffenden' catalogue essay by Martina Margetts
(commissioned by Barrett Marsden gallery) Published by the
National Glass Centre, Sunderland. 1999. UK
ISBN 0-9536836-0-5
Title: 'Defiance Tableau' |
Title: National Glass Centre Show |
Title: 'Probe' |
Title: 'Feeding' |
Title: 'Breath' from Severed Tableau |
Title: View of 'Storage Room' |
For a second Barrett Marsden show in 2001 Woffenden started to move away from the body as a source and looked more to her own surroundings and the impact of existing forms and symbols.
At her forthcoming solo show, as on other occasions, the remote gallery space will be transformed by importing elements of her working environment. Draped swathes of white tarpaulin sheets are planned and large clear blown glass bells will be simply strung with thick rope in a dramatic contrast to the minimal industrial interventions of previous installations.
This new body of work draws more literally from her surroundings as she looks for a means of expression less directly attributed to the human form.Woffenden explains. 'I am moving away from carved body abstractions, from something so hands on. A few years ago I made a piece, part coffin, part crib, that was full of this white structure. I really liked the combination; pieces of white glass inside the clear block, it was very "bodily" - like dripped bits of flesh, or fabric - technically its difficult, but I kept coming back to it'. Searching for a vehicle to carry this structure, Woffenden considered her studio weighing scales; 'The form is very figurative, it has a face. It's very monumental and carries an industrial everyday quality; I used it quite literally.'
The simple block like composition of the scales gives an understated foil for the floating, ghostly white sheets. Where previously we found layered meanings in the ambivalent, gestural forms, we are now drawn in by the chance positioning of an interior landscape, frozen with the conformity of a familiar object. Woffenden sees references to gravestones and to the baroque drama of a marble-clad interior of an Italian church and both are sources of inspiration. 'I am trying to make something very beautiful and about life, and yet I am aware that it looks like a monument of death as well', she explains.
Stripped of ornamental status Woffenden exposes glass as a powerful medium. She manipulates its ability to trap internal elements, freezing them at random within the illusion of a space made solid. The essential paradox that something so solid can be fragile works in tandem with contradictions Woffenden confronts in her work; beginnings and endings, celebration and reflection, a raw beauty, an alarming openness, a serenity and an overwhelming reminder of our own mortality.
Extracts from 'Art Review' article by Julia Pitts.
November 2001
p.78/79
She [Woffenden] uses found objects to contextualize a work - to create a sense of place. These are frequently made of low status materials, such as cardboard, ply, or rusting metal, and serve to counterbalance any perceived preciousness of the glass. Some contrasting effects achieved are those of calmness pitched against violence. Passivity against activity, and polished brilliance curbed by the grubby, discarded and broken.
Title: 'Padded bracket inside glass form' |
|
 Title: 'Heaviness' and 'Bell'. A detail of the exhibition. Date: 2001 Medium: cast glass Dimensions90x45x55cm Photographer: Woffenden |
Title: 'Steamed Glass in a Plastic Tray' |
Site Specific shows
In the Summer of 2002 Woffenden produced pieces for two site specific exhibitions; 'Diversion' and 'The Uncanny Room'.
'Diversion', at the Museum of Garden History, Lambeth Palace, London, was curated by Danielle Arnaud. In this group show, works were placed within the museum - a deconsecrated church, and the surrounding garden.Writing in Crafts, Ruth Pavey disscussed the original uses of the gardening artefacts displayed in the museum and goes on to say:
Now that they are just there to be looked at, they have already made a move in the direction of becoming art. It was thus an apt idea of gallery owner and curator Danielle Arnaud's, to send artists in among them, inviting a response to that very particular environment. Of the 23 artists represented in and around the museum and its garden, many made work specifically for the show, some of it calculated to blend in so well with the other exhibits that they seemed to have undergone that evolutionary process of mimicking, whereby creatures come to look much like their surroundings.
Extract from exhibition review by Ruth Pavey in Crafts Magazine Nov/Dec 2002
She later discusses the 'Pair of bells' and 'Cluster of bells' by Woffenden:
The sparkling glass and whiteness of the rope, so graphic in effect,contrasted well with the agreeable clutter of wooden objects,... Cluster, a bunch of 3 bells, was hooked up at ceiling height in the cornerof a white painted lobby,... the rim of each transparent bell readas a dark ellipse, which again, in combination with the 3 trailing greentipped ropes was suggestive of drawing.
Title: 'Pair of Bells' |
Title: 'Cluster of Bells' |
'The Uncanny Room' was shown at Pitts Hanger Manor (Sir John Soane's house, London) and The Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham, UK in 2002. Curated by Janice West and Tessa Peters, it featured the work of Ralph Ball, Caroline Broadhead, Carl Clerkin, Gitta Gschwendtner, Mah Rana, Richard Slee, Hans Stofer, & Emma Woffenden. The exhibition explored the more ambiguous and unsettling side of the domestic world through installations and interventions in and among the rooms of the two venues.
The exhibition draws on ideas discussed by Freud in his 1919 essay 'The Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche) in which he suggests that an uncanny experience, 'is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced'. Such an experience can arise when a repressed memory is partially recalled or, when we are confronted with ideas that we believed our rational minds had laid to rest.
Emma Woffenden uses glass with an understanding and assurance that lends power to each piece. An installation of ethereal glass bells seems to be barely tangible, an impression that is paradoxically heightened on hearing their rich, resonant tone. Our expectations of objects and materials are summarily subverted in an old cardboard box lined with the magical brilliance of crystal.
She has commented on her approach: 'I am interested in things unformed rather than deformed. I am fascinated with pre-birth things: always the beginnings, primordial things - the early essence of things'. Her curious forms can induce an oscillation of ideas concerning contrasting states of being. For example, two black fibreglass forms, Contrast I & II are suggestive of hunting trophies, of the arms waving through walls as in JeanCocteau's 'Orphee' - on the one hand death, on the other some primordial life form. Such ambiguities add to the narrative possibilities of a work and amplify its uncanny content.
Extracts from the Pitshanger Manor gallery guide by Tessa Peters
Title: 'Bells in stairwell' |
Title: 'Cardboard box with crystal lining' |
Title: 'Cardboard box with crystal lining' |
Title: 'Contract I' |
Title: 'Contract I & II' |
Current Work (2003)
This exhibition was compiled with the kind co-operation of Emma Woffenden and was first published on the IIRG's Gateway to Glass website (www.gatewaytoglass.org).
'Diversion' and 'The Uncanny Room' will be followed by another site responsive project. Woffenden has been commissioned by 3 galleries 'Fabrica' in Brighton, 'Angel Row' in Nottingham and 'First Site' in Colchester to produce an evolving solo show, 'No Horizon', that responds to all 3 spaces also considering their previous uses. The first show at Fabrica is scheduled to open Spring 2003.
