LIQUIDMATTERLIGHT

 

I came to use the materials I work with largely because of their particular properties and their inherent qualitative differences. Common, everyday glass is a hard, brittle, yet slow moving liquid, a transmitter and reflector of light with a solidity that reveals, rather than conceals. Its very transparency often belies its actual thickness-- at its most thin state it can possess a veritable depth. At its thickest it can appear as thin as water. Its inherent color is a rich aqua hue that intensifies and deepens with increasing layers.

Waxes too possess a liquidity and luminosity of one degreee or another, as well as their own inherent color. The waxes, melted and brushed on the sheets of glass, vary by degrees in their translucency and color depending on the number of layers applied. Beeswax developes and ever-deepening, rich color the loger it is exposed to heat. Silicone, the glue that holds all together, has a slight yet particular milkiness, which changes the way the glass appears and, when in some cases of contact, can affect the tonality and hue of the waxes. Black printing ink, the one material most closely related to "art" materials, exists in its own viscous stae and tends toward grayness in multi-layered constructions.

While I have always been well aware of the mercurial properties of these materials, I became more so as I began to introduce a more geometric structure. It seems that the materials' often-changing, shape-shifting, unpredictability has become more accentuated within a more rigorous format. The works may give the appearance of being precise-- in incremental measurements or sharpness of edge-- but in truth they are not. On close inspection there are imperfections throughout-- a ragged edge or too-thick drop of wax; a wobbly, bubbled bead of silicone; a not-clean-cut thickness of glass. If anything, I try to approach the work with a sense of accuracy rather than precision, the former being more powerful. Accuracy is about the rightness of the whole entity rather than the fit of its idividual parts. Whille accuracy does not preclude imperfection, precision does and often at the loss of a sense of the whole.

Ultimately it has been throught the process of working with these materials that I have come to understand what my work is really about. It is about light...light and its relationship to matter. How matter reveals as much about light as light reveals about matter. How light becomes carved matter and matter carves light. How the two reveal each other's continual states of change. Most profoundly, I have come to understand that art itself is a kind of light.

 

Melissa Kretschmer

New York 2005