|
Mathew PorkolaGlass
I always feel suspended between opposites. I want my work to have elegance, a quality inherent in glass that first attracted me to it, but I also want humor, a sense of the ridiculous. I want the rigors of formalism and the honesty of expressionism, the optimism of innocence and the fatalism of mortality. This tension informs what I feel is my best work.
It was while trying to decide whether or not to commit to a postgraduate program in critical theory that I was introduced to glassblowing and found that the issues I was concerned with, the ideas of coherence, consistency and that elusive elegance, were all immediate in an actual physical way. Glass, in addition to its challenges and pleasures, became an exemplification of a certain kind of problem solving. What started as a lark opened up a new way of thinking about and existing in the material world. The objects are the trace of that process. |