Mesophase | Liquid, Rope, Coiling
Created as Artist in Residence, Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA, 2015
Solo exhibition, Traver Gallery, Seattle, WA,
February 1, 2018 - March 31, 2018
When molten glass falls from height into a deep tank of water, the stream buckles and stacks on itself, a behavior physicists call liquid rope coiling. The water catches each coil mid-motion, and Ginsberg retrieves the form before it can collapse. Begun in 2010 with glass cast into flooded ice molds, the series took seven years of testing, broken tanks, and steam burns before these fleeting shapes could be kept. Pushed to the limit of what glass can withstand, the forms are visceral and elemental, recalling lava meeting the ocean as new land forms. They also extend the Surrealist practice of coulage, where molten bronze or chocolate dropped into water let chance make unimaginable sculpture.
Return #7
20” x 12” x 12” (51 x 30 x 30 cm)
Glass formed under water
2015
Traver Gallery, Seattle, WA
Accretion #09
21” x 11” x 7”
Glass formed underwater
2015
Catchment
Dimensions Vary
Glass formed underwater
2015
Mesophase - Catchment #7
15” x 15” x 7.5
Glass formed underwater
2015
Mesophase - Catchment #3
9” x 11” x 7”
Glass formed underwater
2015
Catchment #4
9.5” x 11.5” x 6”
Glass formed underwater
2015
Liquid, Rope, Coiling
Video, 1:00
2015
Promotional video for the exhibition at Traver Gallery, Seattle.
Filmed in the Museum of Glass hot shop, the footage shows all three methods behind the works on this page: molten glass stripped from a solid gather before the same form plunges back to recover it, wrapped around the outside of a blown form, and most successful - caught inside a submerged basin. Each attempt lasts only seconds and depends on a crew moving in close coordination around the tank.
Special thank you to Ben Cobb, Sara Gilbert, and the Museum of Glass team for their expertise in realizing this work.