Artwork
Craft
Nature
#Andrea Spencer
#glass
#sculpture
#sea
“Mariner’s Tale.” All photos © Andrea Spencer, shared with permission
Whereas a seaweed often known as bladderwrack may not sound like one thing you’d wish to eat, the distinctive kelp is in actual fact fairly tasty and will get its identify from small air pockets in its leaves akin to tiny bladders. For glass artist Andrea Spencer, the tendrils, bulbs, fronds, and combos of organisms present the place to begin for an ongoing sequence of stylish sculptures.
Simply inland of the rugged North Antrim shoreline in Northern Eire, Spencer and her husband, glassblower Scott Benefield, work in studios arrange in outbuildings of a former farm. “My process usually starts with collecting or recalling something seen or found in the natural world,” Spencer says. “This becomes a point of departure, and I proceed by manipulating and transforming the material: creating, assembling, and arranging forms.” Again in her studio, she shows the gadgets she’s collected by suspending or pinning them into layered compositions and capturing them in drawings or glass.
Spencer first got interested within the medium throughout a two-year program centered on constructed textiles, when her analysis led her towards stained glass. She turned enthralled by the work of John Piper and Patrick Reyntiens, and she or he traveled round England to doc as a lot of their work as she may discover. The artist then enrolled within the Architectural Glass program on the College of Edinburgh earlier than transferring to Northern Eire and devoting time to studio work as a lot as attainable.
Element of “Flotsam and Jetsam.” Picture by Studio David Pauley
The problem of portraying practical botanicals is matched by Spencer’s curiosity in bodily fragility. “I am intrigued with how the material behaves when it is pushed to the extreme and how glass will display the evidence of that behaviour,” she says. “Often the pieces I make are exceedingly fragile.” The partitions of hole types can typically be as skinny as an eggshell, and suspended items dangle by glass threads lower than a millimeter thick.
“My pieces are more than mere botanical or sea life models, though,” she says. Her sculptures usually take the type of flowers or foliage discovered on land, impressed by interactions with gentle and conceptually linking nature to humanity. “Leaf veining recalls our own circulatory system; a mermaid’s purse becomes a womb,” she says. “The fragility of the natural object aligns with the delicacy of the glass object, which speaks to the perilous aspects of life in general.”
Spencer is at the moment centered on instructing, getting ready work for forthcoming group exhibits in London and Belfast and designing a customized glass decoration commissioned by a Royal institution. Regulate the artist’s web site and Instagram for updates, and buy items straight from Benefield Spencer Glass Store.
“Siren’s Song”
“Seaweed Bladderwrack”
“Seaweed Irish moss”
“The Shallows I”
“We the Drowned.” Picture by Simon Mills
Element of “We the Drowned.” Picture by Simon Mills
“The Shallows III”
#Andrea Spencer
#glass
#sculpture
#sea
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