Residency collaboration with USA artist, Sarah Gilbert
Glazenhuis Center for Flemish Art, Lommel, Belgium
2019
This project explores the interplay of human and non-human life within the broader ecologies of Lommel, and the consequences of historical and ongoing resource extraction in the area. The discovery of Lommel’s fine high-quartz sand in the early 1800s spurred the small nation of Belgium to become the world's largest glass producer by the mid-20th century. While a robust sand mining and glass manufacturing industry remains active, areas like Lommel Sahara are simultaneously being re-made as environmentally protected zones of multi-species care. These two intertwined ecologies sit uneasily side-by-side, raising urgent questions about how we define the the cultural vs the natural, as well as the functional vs. the decorative.
Drawing on local ecologies in both material and allegorical senses, we collected local sand to create a paste for fusing into fragile and delicate meshes, which we then rolled-up in the hot glass studio to bind sandy surface patterns onto new blown-glass vessels. The imagery and patterns contained in these sand meshes are based on the structure of plants we found locally in nearby Lommel Sahara, and the vessels are based on important historical forms in Flemish material culture.
As humans increasingly learn to acknowledge our entanglements with, and responsibilities to, other life on earth, how might our relationship to objects – from the industrial to the domestic - also need to shift? Inviting us to question any fixed boundary between form and matter, this project helps us glimpse worlds of lively material flourish, even or especially in moments of heightened precarity.