Deconstruction

Construction

Hot glass is almost like honey, just a bit hotter, and it almost shapes itself under the influence of high temperature, gravity and the tender hand of a glass blower. I am curious about how hot glass moves, how it collapses, intertwines and bends if you just let it be. How does the shape of a hot glass bubble change if one lets it become very long and then bends it? What happens if you melt hot bubbles together, how do they fold, melt, stick together and become one or not?

Construction:

There are two randomly (as far as that is possible) blown bubbles. Each of them has fist size. The two bubbles are molten together in hot condition. They moved and twist around each other. Now they are static in their state of being, static in the way they reacted towards each other. Sometimes they have more contact, have more surface is touching each other, sometime they lose each other. It is a very complex form and shape, which one can hardly fully understand.

Deconstruction:

My basic idea is to investigate the materiality, identity and states of existence of a blown ‘double bubble glass’ object, I call it ‘An Object’, approximately in the size of two fists. 

To investigate those forms and to grasp the Gestalt of these explorative pieces, I grind them and make prints from the rim. Almost like an autopsy or cross-section, I slice the forms and then trace their cross-sections to create prints on paper. This I do until they are physically gone. Nevertheless they continue to exist in a different form of being. I wonder if one can understand those glass shapes better if they are sliced and ‘reduced’ to a sequence of two-dimensional images? Or does this take away the ‘magic’ of the whole piece? What happens if you try to re-build the glass form? Can you reconstruct it like it was before by using the prints as clues?

Reconstruction:

I am interested in the reconstruction, because it is based on the traces ‘An Object’ left behind. Depending on which material (plastic, paper, glass) I choose and use, the reconstructed object gains a totally different appearance from the original.  They still carry information (truth) of the original object, in the same time they are independent and have autonomous identity. It is a replication without being a replication.

Lover11/127 reconstruction (my soul), 256cm x 50cm x 40cm, paté de verre,  2017,  Jenny Ritzenhoff

This is the reconstruction of a blown glass object.