GLASS ROUTES As a project, Bamboo Scroll had taken some three
the eventual elevation of the installation against
or, The Whale (1850) can be read as a sustained
years to negotiate, and became the most visible
a great curtain of daylight, and the central well
elegy to the human culture of the Nantucket whaling
public icon of our collaborative partnership.
space of the entrance hall, characterise his technique
industry before the advent of new technology, in
The concept took as its point of departure ancient
of invention. A technique that travels light, wears
the form of the mechanical harpoon, destroyed
Chinese literary artefacts, namely engraved bamboo
its learning lightly, and resulted in a major work
it. In what was still called the new world Melville
strips bound together and forming a kind of flexible
which drew deftly upon two cultures, winning
both lived and wrote its passing, the fragile human
scroll. The brief was I believe unconsciously
immediate acceptance in both.
ecology of which is encrypted in his naming the
informed by the bamboo scaffolding which seemed to fill the library when I first visited it as a building site in April 1996. Chinese written characters are incorporated in cast optical crystal blocks in raised and polished relief, providing cursive transparent windows into the light medium. The glass is held in a parallel ribbon structure of flame-cut and patinated steel.
In the hot course of ten July days, New Glass Economy drew more than eighteen thousand
My analogous experience - as Glasshouse, and
head-count), such was the curiosity and appetite
eventually Production Manager at Stuart Crystal
for this strange new work. Were we sure, I was
- struck me as precisely such a moment. Just as
asked at a public seminar, that everything in the
the heavy nostalgia of an exact replica of the
show was made of glass?
cut crystal captain’s bowl from the White Star
New Glass Economy evidenced the fundamental
transatlantic liner, Titanic, proved a rather
significance and substantive role of British art
originals, reversed out in raised relief through the
schools in developing the studio glass economy
mould making process, and they comprise a loosely
that replaced the declining UK handmade,
ordered series representing elemental natural
manufacturing tradition of the last four decades
and human qualities. This was not a text as such
of the twentieth century.
the word sequence - but the layered disposition of Chinese written characters had clearly influenced the overall composition of the piece. This was Reid’s first engagement with written symbols as found object and it is the visual energy of these characters rather than their linguistic meaning, that stands foremost. Physically and metaphorically speaking, the characters hang luminous and illuminated in broad daylight. A work in which material preceded meaning, and making came before knowing. Reid’s attention to the site of this work, his response to the library as a location, its cultural purpose,
Native American tribe. (Mason 1638).
visitors (before the attendants stopped their
The Chinese characters derive from engraved print
- there is no woven narrative connection between
fictive whaleboat The Pequod after an extinct
In the introductory essay to the published catalogue for New Glass Economy, I had included an aside which on that occasion did not survive Sara’s disapproving editorial knife, but which I trust she will forgive me for restoring here. The note made
compelling exhibit for Shanghai teenagers in the exhibition that opened just as (in a coincidence that simply could not have been scripted two years previously!) Kate Winslett and Leonardo di Caprio premièred in the Shanghai screening of, well, that film. Within three years of New Glass Economy, glassmaking at the Redhouse Glassworks (built in 1776) and at the Stuart Crystal factory at the White House glassworks next door, had folded with the
reference to the decade I worked in the glass crystal
closure of the site in March 2002.
industry (‘sounds like your own private Cultural
The Shanghai projects grew out of a close
Revolution?’ my Shanghai colleague Pan Yaochang
collaboration that began in January 1996 between
once observed with the lightest touch of mischief).
the glass programme at Wolverhampton, where it
I had likened the awareness of my historical moment
was my privilege to succeed Keith Cummings as
in Stourbridge - my glasshouse experience - to that of the nineteenth-century American writer, Herman Melville, whose masterpiece Moby Dick;
course leader in 1994, and the College of Fine Arts at
ENGLISH TEXT
Shanghai University. Before long, a similar link was
CHINESE TEXT
forged with Tsinghua University in Beijing, >>
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