Entitled “After You’re Gone,” this still life by glass blower Beth Lipman is created almost completely out of glass objects, including transparent snails moving in on the leftovers. The installation refracts the opulent decay of Dutch still lives. In Lipman’s art, glass is both metaphor and material, a shimmering reflection of time’s passage.
A self-described “craft child,” she works the boundaries between art, craft and design. Working quickly with an artist’s sense of basic volumes, she says in one interview, “I’m striving for drawing in glass — not an academic rendition but a translation of objects in my voice and my material.”
Many of her pieces crack or shatter during construction or installation — and broken glass figures as an element in the final displays. Says Lipman in a recent NYT interview, “‘‘I’m just a caretaker of objects that may or may not survive with or without me.”
Photo of “After You’re Gone” from the Heller Gallery.
— Julia Lupton · 2008-10-06
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THE BOOK