From Sand: Works in Glass by Ken Daley, Richard Jolley and Joyce Scott
January 16 – March 22, 2009
When lightning travels from the sky to earth and strikes sand, the heat — over 54 thousand degrees Fahrenheit — fuses it into fulgurites, or petrified lightning. Many artists have found inspiration in the transformation of sand into glass. The very properties of glass — fluid, transparent, malleable — are converted into their opposites — solid, brittle and hard — through the application of intense heat. Recreating this dramatic and violent process, artists act as a conduit for their own ideas and images, producing rare and fragile objects of art through glass blowing and sculpting processes.
Over centuries artists have developed techniques to explore the many qualities of glass, including bead-making, blowing molten glass into molds or tubes and sculpting molten glass with tools such as shears, tweezers and paddles. In our next exhibition, From Sand, Ken Daley, Richard Jolley and Joyce Scott explore their artistic visions using different forms of glass.
Professor and scholar Ken Daley has built a body of work in a wide variety of media over several decades. Earning his BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art and his MFA from the Yale University School of Art & Architecture, Daley has taught at Old Dominion University since 1965. He has exhibited works in print media, drawings and neon glass installation pieces at many institutions over the years such as the Muscarelle Museum at the College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts Museum in Hangzhou, People’s Republic of China. Whether he uses specially formed glass tubes or salvaged glass forms from commercial neon signage, characteristic of Daley’s installations is a playfulness with words, their meaning and their forms. In a piece titled Pronominal Time, where two simple and elegant light tubes are installed in the form of an hourglass, Daley explores “the oldest linguistic word roots, which happen to refer to the self [I and me] and to the other [t'], and which conveniently make up the word ‘time.’”
Richard Jolley has been living and working in his studio in Knoxville, Tennessee, since he earned his degree from the Peabody College at Vanderbilt University. He continued his studies at North Carolina’s Penland School and has become widely known for his large-scale figurative works in original, brilliant colors. In towering pieces such as the 58-inch Translating Substance, his skill realizes the graceful human forms poised on a plateau and detailed foliage before a large, sheltering figure. The radiant colors glow with the vitality of nature and beauty. Jolley’s works are included in major collections such as the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, the Corning Museum of Glass in New York and the Mint Museum of Craft & Design in Charlotte.
Larger than life, the personality and vitality of Joyce Scott is contradicted by the scale of the tiny seed bead she uses to create her complex sculptures. Each bead seems to be permeated with her vivid life force. As they accumulate and are shaped into forms that become people, relationships and scenes they seem to radiate. Since 1970 Scott has been an educator and a prolific artist creating sculptures, jewelry, prints and collages in a mix of materials such as ceramics, cloth, metal and fibers. She has traveled extensively through the American Southwest, Central America, South America and Europe observing and incorporating media and techniques from around the world. Scott earned her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA in Crafts from the Institute Allende in Mexico and has exhibited at the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, and most recently in a major touring retrospective at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Maryland Institute College of Art. Scott has been awarded major honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Anonymous Was a Woman and the American Craft Council.
The exhibition opens to the public with a 6 p.m. reception on Friday, January 16, which all three artists will attend. A variety of related classes and programs are planned.
