Between Hair and Glass

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Object Name: 
Sculpture
Title: 
Between Hair and Glass
Accession Number: 
2011.4.49
Dimensions: 
Overall H: 9.8 cm, W: 56.5 cm, D: 38.7 cm
Location: 
Not on Display
Date: 
2011
Web Description: 
Anne Wilson creates sculpture, drawings, performances, and videos that explore themes of time, loss, and private and social ritual. Her works are conceptual, yet they embrace handwork made of everyday materials, such as table linen, bed sheets, human hair, lace, thread, glass, and wire. Between Hair and Glass presents glass bobbins that are wound with glass, thread, and the artist’s hair. The sculpture was made as part of a project in which Wilson explored the relationship between the making of textiles and of glass. Like threads and yarns (and hair), glass is flexible, and it can be fiber-like, when molten, to bend, spin, and wrap. By translating fiber bobbin winding and rewinding into glass, Wilson finds analogies between the two materials and their modes of production. Wilson’s work refers both to industrial and hand processes and to the diverse cultural contexts in which things are made. In contemporary society, which is intensely focused on technology, there is a renewed interest in art and design that emphasizes the personal and the unique, and in objects that reflect the deliberate and intimate tactility of work made by hand. Wilson was introduced to glass during a residency at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, in 2005. She continued to work at other studios, notably the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington, and the glass department of the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. In order to produce her sculptures, Wilson relied on the hands of artists and glassworkers Jessica Jane Julius, Nancy Callan, Katherine Gray, Kimberly Pence, David Willis, Ben Cobb, Alex Stisser, and Conor McClellan. For more information, see Chris Molinski, ed., Anne Wilson: Wind/Rewind/Weave, Knoxville, Tennessee: Knoxville Museum of Art and White Walls Inc., 2011.
Provenance: 
Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Source
2011-04-18
Primary Description: 
Blown and hot-worked glass, sandblasted; thread, hair; wood and plexiglas base.
CA+D Reopening 2020
Venue(s)
Corning Museum of Glass
2020 refresh of the Contemporary Art and Design galleries after the deinstallation of the 2019 temporary exhibition, "New Glass Now".
The Corning Museum of Glass: Notable Acquisitions 2011 (2012) illustrated, p. 70; BIB# AI87745
Recent Important Acquisitions (New Glass Review 33) (2012) illustrated, p. 125, middle; BIB# AI87134