Jane Bruce: Contained Abstraction

jane bruce contained abstraction

contained abstraction My work is deeply rooted in the history of the decorative or applied arts and the examination of objects, particularly the vessel. If I were to pick an adjective to describe my work, it might be ‘formal’. I am interested in how composition, colour, light, proportion, and the juxtaposition of positive and negative space work within an object or group of objects. Formal is a term rarely used in the context of the decorative or applied arts, but it is essential in painting and sculpture and is, I believe, equally essential to the object.

In 2005 the specific form of my work undertook a major shift away from blown work to kilnformed and hot cast forms, which, whilst concerned with abstraction, light and transparency, continue my investigation of the vessel. At the same time I have been working on a series of house forms, which explore a more personal concern related to landscape and loss in a particular place, the far northeast of Scotland.

I am presently working with the Portland, Oregon fabrication studio, Studio Ramp, to produce these pieces. This way of working has opened up new and unexpected directions in my work not previously possible.

It has afforded me the opportunity to move from one process, blowing, to another, kilnforming, enabling me to expand and develop ideas and content within a body of work unrestricted by technique. It has also provided the time to move from one media, glass, to another, drawing, permitting the development of works on paper that open up and compliment the ideas produced in glass.

Jane Bruce JANUARY 2008

White House (Middle Distance), 2007, charcoal and pastel on paper, 15.125 x 29.5 inches White House (Far Distance), 2007, charcoal and pastel on paper, 21.125 x 27.625 inches PHOTOS: S. BARRALL

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JANE BRUCE – glass and community We at Bullseye Gallery are delighted to host our first solo exhibition of works by international artist and educator Jane Bruce.

As over two thousand nomadic glass lovers prepare to descend upon Portland, Oregon for the 38th annual Glass Art Society conference in the summer of 2008, I can think of no artist more appropriate to this time and place than one whose professional life spans three continents, more than three decades, a near encyclopedic technical repertoire, and a clarity of aesthetic vision that so graphically distills the essence of our field.

Yet nothing in the fascinating narrative of this artist’s career resonates quite as powerfully with me as her recent transition from blowing to kilnwork, from hands-on maker to designer purist.

Sea House, 2007 kilnformed glass 11.25 x 7 x 2 inches PHOTO: S. BARRALL

Bruce’s latest move to working with fabricators has been realized largely through her long relationship with Portland artists and studio owners Mel George and Jeremy Lepisto. That a UK-born, Australiantransplanted, New York-based artist is doing the strongest work of her life, using the internet to direct the realization of her designs at one of this country’s most accomplished kiln-glass studios speaks to the vitality of contemporary studio glass today.

This exhibition celebrates the work of a single artist; at the same time, it applauds the global community in which she operates and the relationships that are its glue.

Lani McGregor APRIL 2008 Lani McGregor is Executive Director of the Bullseye Gallery in Portland, Oregon.

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EXPRESSIVE FORMALITY – the art of Jane Bruce Since she decided to work in glass over thirty years ago, Jane Bruce has committed herself to the medium, as an artist, a member of the glass community, and a teacher. After leaving Britain in 1979, she spent long periods of time living first in the United States and then in Australia, returning in the new millennium to the home in New York which she had always kept. She is best described as a British New Yorker, somebody who has embraced the American way of life, whilst remaining quintessentially British in her considered attitude to the arts. Her self-expression as an artist comes from a background in which she was taught and learned to combine diverse talents into one rounded whole. She draws beautifully and has incorporated this talent into her glass creations in different ways. The firm and uncluttered sense of line in her drawings is reflected in the clarity of shapes both of her vessel forms and her more recent journey into sculpture. Whether she cuts deep Black/Red ‘Object’, 1997 blown, wheel-cut glass 6.25 x 11 x 6.25 inches

into the surface of her vessels or does her typical surface outline drawings she

Private collection

forms show the same clarity of design and purpose. It is the kind of economy that

PHOTO: D. PATERSON

can only come from clear artistic thinking.

shows a rare ability for getting maximum effect with minimum statement. Her

At the Royal College of Art in London, Jane’s studies from 1971 to 1973 were in a recently formed glass department where the course was led by Sam Herman,

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a young American who had come to Britain a few years earlier on a Fulbright scholarship. He encouraged his students to forget tradition and “make it new.”

It was an attitude that met with only limited response at this venerable British institution, although it did make a new generation aware of contemporary directions in glass and laid the foundations of the British Studio Glass movement in which Jane was an early pioneer and co-founder of the society “British Artists in Glass.” For her the great discovery was the vessel and its potential as an expressive three-dimensional canvas. She became an accomplished glass blower

Whether she cuts deep into the surface of her vessels or does her typical surface outline drawings she shows a rare ability for getting maximum effect with minimum statement. and a partner in the newly established “Glasshouse,” a ground-breaking glass artists’ co-operative in central London.

Sensing that America was more open to new ideas in glass, Jane felt the urge to see what was happening there. In England she felt somewhat trapped, partly due to changing circumstances at the Glasshouse, where she remained for six years (1973-1979), and partly because her own somewhat conservative middle-class background restricted her aspirations to be part of a new world. It was time to broaden her horizons and in 1979 she decided on a break in the United States.

She never imagined that after spending two years as a special student at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred her career path would keep her in the United States until 1994 when she accepted the offer of a teaching post at the Australian National University’s Glass Workshop in Canberra, Australia,

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where, with the late Stephen Procter, they built one of the most prestigious and successful Glass education programs in the world. Teaching has been very much a part of Jane’s life and her input into her students’ lives has been of great significance to them.

Every move in Jane’s life has brought with it new sources of inspiration and new avenues to explore in her work.

Of her move to Australia she says, “Australia was important, the flora and fauna and the aboriginal art, the division of space in aboriginal paintings and their idea of mapping both the real world and the spirit world in one work. All of it was very influential in a series I did from 1994-1998 called “Objects” and to a lesser extent on the “bottles.” Both in her work and in her career decisions Jane has always wanted to move ahead, going both physically and artistically where she felt she could be most creative.

Her love of the vessel with its combined possibilities of metaphorical content and surface decoration has been a lifelong passion. But never content to repeat White/Ruby/Black ‘Sentinal’, 2003 blown, wheel-cut and sandblasted glass 24 x 4.5 (dia.) inches

herself, she has moved from one idea to another, from “cut-out vessels” to the

Collection of the Victoria and Albert Musuem, London

as containment, emptiness, clear definition of space. She likes and respects the

PHOTO: D. PATERSON

bottle form “Sentinels” and most recently to the house objects which, although more sculptural or sometimes two-dimensional, are based on vessel ideas, such formal discipline of the vessel and has chosen to describe her work as “formal.”

What that means is that she feels most comfortable in the zone where order and symmetry prevail. Classical modernism best describes her artistic parameters.

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Within those she has been highly inventive. Her work is relaxing on the eye, its harmonious and carefully contemplated colours and shapes the kind of tonic one enjoys in a sonnet or a well-crafted piece of music. She firmly believes that there is no art without exquisite craftsmanship, her reason for loving Martin Puryear’s “wonderful strange objects.” Her heroes include Mozart and Bach, early Renaissance painters like Boticelli and modern masters like Matisse and Morandi.

For her the great discovery was the vessel and its potential as an expressive three-dimensional canvas.

Quoting Morandi as an inspiration comes as no surprise, for he too spent a lifetime finding poetry in vessel forms. But her all-time hero is James Turrell.

“When you look at or experience his work there is a moment of recognition when all of a sudden you get it and a whole world opens up…I would like to get that moment into my work.”

Jane’s relationship with Bullseye is by no means a recent development and dates back to “Latitudes,” a combined initiative during the 1990s between Bullseye and the Canberra Glass Workshop, in which she was closely involved. More recently during her five-year tenure as Artistic Director of North Lands Creative Glass (2002-2007) in the North of Scotland, there have been numerous master classes organized by her in which the use of Bullseye Glass has featured prominently. It inevitably made her curious about the possibilities of kilnforming and after careful consideration she decided to make the move from one technique to another. It has been both something of a release and a new adventure in glassmaking terms.

Her involvement with Bullseye and her frequent visits to the North of Scotland

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have had a marked influence on the most recent body of work. Spending time back in her homeland has been something of a sentimental journey, and the amazing Northern light and bleak but beautiful Scottish highland landscape have found their way into her work. The sculptures she now makes are inspired by derelict or semi-derelict “crofts� (stone-built farmers’ cottages) dotted around the Caithness landscape. They tell a story of lost identities, abandonment, rural

Her love of the vessel with its combined possibilities of metaphorical content and surface decoration has been a lifelong passion. life and have all the charm and emotional content that the emptiness of ruins can engender. Jane has made them in a personal language that again makes one aware of how she takes a formal shape or a formal idea and makes it her own. In doing so she also communicates thoughts and ideas, which are common to us all.

Dan Klein NOVEMBER 2007 Dan Klein is an authority on contemporary glass and has written and lectured extensively on the subject world-wide.

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Coloured Vase, Bottle, Bowl, 2008, kilnformed and cold-worked glass, 12.75 x 25 x 5 inches installed PHOTO: S. BARRALL

Black Blocks - Vessels, 2008, kilnformed and cold-worked glass, 10.875 x 25.875 x 1.625 inches installed PHOTO: S. BARRALL 9

Black Vase Bottle Bowl, 2007, kilnformed and coldworked glass, 12.75 x 24 x 6 inches installed PHOTO: S. BARRALL

Light Lines, 2006, kilnformed glass, 10.875 x 24.5 x 1.875 inches installed PHOTO: S. BARRALL 10

THE ESSENTIAL HABITAT – recent glass works by Jane Bruce Recently I had an occasion to view Martin Scorsese’s film, “No Direction Home,” on the life and times of the American folk-rock musician Bob Dylan. The title of the film is taken from a line in one of Dylan’s best-known songs, “Like A Rollin’ Stone.” Presumably this is the song that captured the spirit of his generation, what has often been called the “displaced generation” -- the nomadic generation of the sixties that moved from one place to another, seeking adventure and inspiration, exploring new creative and spiritual possibilities, and renewed heights of experience. It appears that this song is talking about the life of a young artist on the cusp of a new age – an age replete with fragmentation and dissolution that would eventually define itself as a cultural revolution.

In reading a statement by the artist Jane Bruce, published in Craft Arts International #51 (2001), I was struck by the similarity between her selfproclaimed desire to move from one place to another and Dylan’s post-Beat generation “on the road” attitude as presented in Scorsese’s film. She states: “My life is driven by my work as an artist. I need to find places that will help me make my work, and through that make myself. After a while, I found I’m

“My life is driven by my work as an artist. I need to find places that will help me make my work, and through that make myself.” no longer challenged by that place and that’s when it’s time to start thinking about moving on.” Jane Bruce’s self-discovery as a glass artist came towards the

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end of her undergraduate studies at Leicester Polytechnic in England. She was studying interior design there when in 1969 a visiting artist introduced glass into the program. On graduating in 1973 from the Royal College of Art she became a partner at the Glasshouse in London and began lecturing at Buckinghamshire College. This continued until 1979 when she decided one day to leave the United Kingdom for the United States where she had been accepted as a student at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in upstate New York. Here she met Wayne Higby – a highly influential ceramic artist, theorist, and professor. At the time, Higby was a serious Greenbergian who advocated formalism not only in painting and sculpture, but also in ceramics. Higby’s position was focused on giving the vessel a certain aesthetic distance and thereby defining the vessel as a form – a “significant form,” to use the term of Clive Bell. Thus, Higby advocated tilting the emphasis away from the functional aspect of the vessel as an object and moving it toward a formal essence, an idea that intrigued Bruce greatly.

Her formalist thinking in relation to the vessel developed further when she began teaching and working at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, in 1981. Four years later, she moved to Brooklyn, New York, where she became a prolific member of

There is more she wants to tell, but the telling required that she take another direction where the form as a modular body in space exceeded the need to decorate it.

The New York Experimental Glass Workshop, now UrbanGlass. In the ensuing years, some of her most important advances occurred when Bruce traveled

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Black Blocks - Outlines, 2007, kilnformed and coldworked glass, 11 x 25.75 x 1.625 inches installed PHOTO: P. FOSTER

Vase, Bottle, Bowl - Outlines, 2008, kilnformed, coldworked and painted glass, 12.625 x 25 x 5 inches installed PHOTO: S. BARRALL 13

far distances to places like Lisbon and Montreal to teach and give lectures, and eventually, in 1994, to the School of Art, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia, where she worked and taught for a decade. To this day, Jane Bruce’s work is still intuitively connected with formalism, although it has moved out of the confines she felt in earlier years. It appears that Bruce’s approach has continued to advance in ways that are less concerned with decoration and more attentive to primary forms – orbs, sentinels, and houses. In addition, she works with flattened forms in glass – bottles, vases, and bowls – through the use of transparent cast glass or with black and white variations of the same shapes. Given that she has explored the vessel in the medium of glass for the past three decades, Bruce has finally resolved that, while technique and ornamentation are important, they do not tell the whole story. There is more she wants to tell, but the telling required that she take another direction where the form as a modular body in space exceeded the need to decorate it.

Bruce continues to evolve as an artist who functions both intuitively and conceptually in relation to form. This is evident from the basis of her visible energy and her Ghost House, 2008 detail view PHOTO: S. BARRALL

dogged persistence to move beyond the constraints and limitations of a strict mediumistic approach to glass. In this sense, Bruce wants to define a concept both in her glass sculpture and in her drawings as made evident in this current body of work. To define a form in reductive, systemic, or conceptual terms may require that the artist suspend rarefied aesthetics in order to push the work to another level. One might see her recent flattened, block-like forms in terms of

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Ghost House, 2008, kilnformed and coldworked glass, Caithness stone, 11.625 x 7 x 11.625 inches PHOTO: S. BARRALL

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architecture through a carefully articulated use of positive and negative space. This clarity of form in Bruce’s recent vessel-forms suggests a feeling of solitude both within and through the object. The solitude within these works opens another way of seeing, a threshold of experience that resembles thought, material process, and the instrumentality of form to which the form is constantly being subjected.

Bruce’s forms have a certain Suprematist appearance, close to Malevich. Yet they also maintain a definitive position within a residual space that complements the natural environment and the symbolic attitudes that intervene in one’s perception of simple geometric shapes.

Bruce’s recent “Empty Houses” were apparently inspired by a series of visits to the Highlands of Scotland where she observed empty dwellings and stone foundations on a wide, empty landscape. The emptiness of the space somehow matched the solitude and emptiness of these houses and their disappearance. It was as if these structures echoed the history of the past. Bruce assembles her ideographic houses using kilnformed glass elements. She has moved away from the vessel to another kind of structure: the essential habitat. These glass houses show a two-story front and back with two horizontal connecting elements pulling them together.

Black House, 2008 kilnformed and coldworked glass 11.625 x 11.75 x 7 inches installed PHOTO: S. BARRALL

In an extended sense, one might consider these “empty houses” as vessels of another type, household vessels, livable vessels. The notion of a primary form in architecture emanating from the concept of a basic container is interesting and somehow reaches into the ancient past where people thought in terms of containers as a form of survival. The fact that Bruce is using kilnformed glass to

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achieve this metaphor is also important as it gives light and illusion to the forms, thus creating a sensory and cognitive awareness of space within, through, and around the house. The house may appear empty, and yet, remains as intimate as it is inexorable. In some discreet way, these works are an expression of settling-in, as if she were in the process of discovering a new home. The new home equals

The solitude within these works opens another way of seeing, a threshold of experience that resembles thought, material process, and the instrumentality of form to which the form is constantly being subjected. the discovery of a new form where the feeling resides less “on the road� than in the spirit of being in a place. The material of glass in the construction of these houses signals another level of transformation, a temporary dwelling, at least, for the present.

Robert C. Morgan NOVEMBER 2007 Robert C. Morgan is an international art critic and teaches in the graduate program of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. He is a Contributing Editor for GLASS and the author of many books, articles, and reviews on contemporary art.

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JANE BRUCE Born Buckinghamshire, UK Resides New York, NY Education

1981 Post-Graduate Studies, Glass & Ceramics, New York State College of Ceramics, Alfred, NY (1979 - 1981) 1973 Master of Arts, Glass, Royal College of Art, London, UK (1971 - 1973) 1970 Diploma of Art & Design, 3D Design, City of Leicester Polytechnic, UK (1967 - 1970) 1967 Foundation Studies, Buckinghamshire College, UK (1965 - 1967) Solo Exhibitions

2005 Sentinel, Palette Contemporary Art and Craft, Albuquerque, NM 2004 Function & Non-Function, Galerie Jean-Claude Chapelotte, Luxembourg 2000 GlassMasters 2000, CoolArts @ The Gallery, Corning, NY 1996 Truth and Consequences, Miller Gallery, New York, NY 1993 Habatat Galleries, Boca Raton, FL 1992 Kurland/Summers Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Braggiotti Gallery, Rotterdam, The Netherlands 1991 Garland Gallery, Santa Fe, NM 1990 Anne O'Brien Gallery, Washington, DC

Kurland/Summers Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1989 Galerie Elena Lee, Montreal, Canada

Anne O'Brien Gallery, Washington, DC 1982 Gallery for Visual Arts, Ohio University, Lancaster, OH Selected Collections

Broadfield House Glass Museum, Kingswinford, UK Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA Corning Museum of Glass, NY Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg, Germany Los Angeles County Museum, CA Mobile Museum of Art, AL Museum fur Kunsthandwerk, Frankfurt, Germany National Art Glass Collection, Wagga Wagga Regional Art Gallery, Australia Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra, Australia

Permanent Collection, Crafts Council, London, UK Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, WA Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia Racine Art Museum, WI The Calleen Collection, Cowra Regional Art Gallery, Australia The Detroit Institute of Arts, MI The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, Akron, OH The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, Australia Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK Awards, Honors & Grants 2003 Professional Experience Program, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia 2002 New Work Grant, Visual Arts/Crafts Board, Australia Council 2002 Singapore Airlines Grant, Capital Arts Patrons Organisation, Canberra, Australia 2001 The Calleen Acquisition Art Award, Cowra Festival Art Awards, Cowra, Australia 2000 Artist-in-Residence, The Studio, Corning Museum of Glass, NY 1999 Professional Experience Program, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia 1998 Visiting Artist/Senior Facilitator, International Young Artists in Glass, Bullseye Glass Co., Portland, OR 1997 Professional Experience Program, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia 1996 Artist Space Project, Megalo Access Arts, Canberra, Australia 1991 Residency Grant, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Baltimore, MD

Masterworks Fellowship, Creative Glass Center of America, Wheaton Village, NJ

Professional Development Grant, Empire State Crafts Alliance, Syracuse, NY 1990 Visual Artist Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts, NY 1989 Visual Artist Fellowship, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Baltimore, MD

Masterworks Fellowship, Creative Glass Center of America, Wheaton Village, NJ 1985 Artist-in-Residence, New York Experimental Glass Workshop, NY

Jane Bruce has taught extensively in the US, as well as in Canada, Europe and Australia. From 1994-2004, she was a lecturer in the Glass Workshop, Canberra School of Art, Australian National University and Head of Workshop 2001-2002. From 2002-2007, she was the Artistic Director for North Lands Creative Glass, Scotland.

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View: Land, Sea, Sky, 2007, graphite, charcoal, and pastel on paper, 22 x 16.125 inches PHOTO: S. BARRALL 19

bullseye gallery ARTIST ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Published in conjunction with the exhibition:

I wish to thank the following people who have made this publication and exhibition possible:

Jane Bruce Contained Abstraction April 1 - May 17, 2008

Lani McGregor and all the team at the Bullseye Gallery; Mel George and Jeremy Lepisto of Studio Ramp, without whose remarkable technical skill, hard work, advice and friendship the fabrication of this work could not have been realized; Kevin Kutch of Pier Glass, Brooklyn, and Daniel Woodward of Woodward Studio, Portland, for their coldworking expertise; and last, but not least, Steven Barall in New York, for his patient photography and attention to detail.

For artwork and artist information, contact:: Bullseye Gallery 300 NW 13th Ave Portland, OR 97209 503-227-0222 phone 503-227-0008 fax gallery@bullseyeglass.com www.bullseyegallery.com Design Nicole Leaper Photography Steven Barrall Photography Paul Foster Photography David Paterson Production Jerry Sayer Cover image: Black House, 2008 kilnformed and coldworked glass 11.625 x 11.75 x 7 inches installed PHOTO: S. BARRALL

Š 2008 BULLSEYE GLASS CO. Black House/White House (Side by Side), 2007 graphite and pastel on paper, 17.75 x 25.5 inches PHOTO: S. BARRALL

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