Yes! That is a catalogue to pursuit!

With great essays by the jurors this earnest catalogue contextualizes the studio glass on its fundaments of history and depicts the status quo of the contemporary. Director of the Glasmuseet Dan Mølgaard in his essay When the present becomes the past –and landmarks emerge highlights the Young Glass competition and notes the global expansion of the glass world paradoxically has made our world smaller, as students and artists travel for training and inspiration and sketches the broader landscape of developments in the various disciplines in which the participants entered their works.  

Susan Warner artistic director of the Museum of Glass, in Tacoma Washington (US) explores Intersections of narrative and craftsmanship in contemporary glass her essay’s two-track vision is narrative concepts and narrative design. Warner concludes the future of glass as developed over the past decade has featured narrative treatments, mixed media and continued experimentation with  various new approaches to process and material, ultimately express concerns about our fast changing world.

Essay Paradigmatic shifts in glass: deconstruction, revaluation and redefinition at a time of change by Maja Heuer, director of The Glass Factory, in Boda, Sweden explains the past decade’s changes through the lens of a struggling economy and energy problems that altered the glass industry’s production methods and consequently glass studios, education, research, as well as, new institutions and forums for glass. An engaging essay, Heuer reveals how changes of content and form within the contemporary glass studio through deconstruction and research with its interdisciplinary focus within various sectors such as biotechnology, technology and material science, digital and communication technologies, has combined to create new perspectives on what constitutes craftsmanship or the tradition of crafts and how we can generate innovation and growth. By breaking down glass traditions, this new view of glass, its production methods and development is forever broadened.

Jeffrey Sarmiento glass artist and programme leader University of Sunderland, United Kingdom, explains in his essay Tension, Technology, Tradition, Transcendence: Perspectives in Young Glass, the prevalence of the autonomous aesthetic object in glass by the submitted entries and his preference as juror. Sarmiento sees developments of artistic expression with refinement in the making of objects in glass that employ video and film, new research methodologies, and technologies, for the action of making.
 
Additionally each participant has two or more pages to present with good photos and smaller explanatory texts their selected works.

Very well designed one should buy this catalogue before visiting the exposition to make the confrontation with the juror’s choices optimal and enjoyable.
Angela van der Burght