In everyday usage, the adjectives broken, crushed and shattered carry dark
emotional connotations. So do the terms damaged, devastated and destroyed. These are
words conveying a tactile sense of hurt that goes well beyond
physical pain.
Now think about a glass jar. It’s
clear, cool, smooth, protective and light — a commonplace
object of uncommon usefulness. But smash that same jar to bits
and it becomes its own opposite. What was transparent becomes
clouded; its cool smoothness becomes a hot zone of jagged
edges. No longer protective, it becomes a source of danger; its
airy lightness becomes leaden deadweight. A once-practical jar
has become useless trash.
In breaking a glass object, you change both
everything and nothing about it: everything, because the object
no longer has its original shape or utility; nothing, because
the fragmented material retains its substance, its mass, its
hardness. Yet that very hardness also accounts for the
brittleness of glass, and once broken, the process is one-way
-- while the glass can be smashed into smaller and smaller
shards, or even pounded into dust, it can’t be repaired
or recreated. Breakage is forever.
The Glass Jars inhabit a transitional space
between the poles of utility and uselessness by combining those
modes: jars in a state of wholeness (as form), containing used
glass in a fragmented state (literally, as content). To
understand the nearly imperceptible distance between these
states: imagine that one of these jars should fall to the
floor, and break. At that moment, is there any difference at
all between the original form and its contents?
FOOTPRINTS
When I began working on the Glass Jar
seriesÊin the spring of 2001, I wasn’t sure where it
would lead. But 9/11 gave the project an ineffable urgency to
me — in some indirect and indescribable way, these varied
systems of jars filled with broken glass became my artistic
response to the destruction of the World Trade Center.
So it made sense, for the context of the
photography exhibit “I Shot NY,” that I
should create a specific work to serve as a Twin Towers
memorial in miniature. “Footprints (Imagine the
Towers)” is probably the most literal piece I’ve
ever done, a direct reference to the two-dimensional outlines
at the base of the former World Trade Center buildings.
The Glass Jars were first shown in a 2004
installation, “The Hard Stuff,” along with ceramic
sculptures by Patsy Cox.