PIPALUK LAKE

CONFIGURATIONS

For the second time, Galerie Maria Lund presents a solo exhibition by the Danish glass artist Pipaluk Lake, whose refined yet raw, expressive style has very few parallels within the world of glass. Pipaluk Lake works with glass as if it were a living thing in perpetual motion. Her pieces are like sublime moments frozen in time as the material changes from one state to another. She, herself, is simply the medium that has set the process in motion, with the eyes and hands that cause it to stop at precisely the point when the piece’s beauty is expressed most clearly. The inherent power of the material is released, with the artist as go-between.

Pipaluk Lake is a pioneer in her field. She gets her drive and inspiration primarily from the sense of making new discoveries – by exploring areas where nobody else has yet ventured, by revealing aspects of reality that nobody has seen so far. She sets her own parameters, steps back, observes the effect of the forces of nature, and then interprets the result according to her own aesthetic sensitivity.

The result is pieces that at once witness the violent creative processes in which glass, fire and metal compete and come together, while expressing a completely clear almost crystalline quality. Pipaluk Lake’s pieces are to high degree pure; scintillatingly sharp in their aesthetic balance. You sense that more than a human hand has been at work. Not even the most sophisticated Venetian techniques can create an expression so abundant as that which is fundamentally the product of nature’s own forces. Pipaluk Lake does not try to dominate the material. She is not ’master of her medium’ in a traditional, hierarchical sense, or where a human owns the material world. It’s all about interplay. Cooperation in mutual respect.

Possibly this unconventional approach to glass is because Pipaluk Lake was originally trained in textile design. A practised eye will be able to trace this background of her work with layers, surfaces and structures. Even though the end result is sculptural, it all starts with one or more plates of glass that are fashioned by combining with metals or metallic compounds. Over the years she has developed a technique that involves hanging or stacking plate glass around a metal structure so that when it is heated in a kiln, the glass will flow and fuse together.

Since there are essentially no ‘rules’ for this process, it is important to have some guidelines, and here Pipaluk Lake has chosen to restrict herself solely to metal and simple metal compounds to define the shape and colour nuances of the surfaces. The colour combinations applied to individual glass layers and the deformation that takes place during the melting process thus serve to emphasize the shape of the objects and the flow of the glass.

In recent years, the metal structures have been given increasing importance in aspects of her work. The wire is twisted and twined to reinforce the structure, and the visible ends of the wire that have been put in for hanging the structure in the kiln are not removed as one might expect, but now represent an important part of the piece’s overall expression. The titles of the pieces have now been chosen to evoke a new kind of pictorial aspect as, for example, Twiggy, in which the glass seems to be draped over a skinny body, or Cradle and Bundle, which gives each piece a clear association with a well known shape.

At the exhibition, in parallel with the works where wires project from the glass, you will also see another important tendency that is an almost direct contrast. You will find a collection of almost monolithic, free-standing pieces, including the series Layers, which works with layers and displacements of almost geometric, abstract nature. These pieces have been created without the otherwise characteristic wires; the edges have been sawn off and polished, giving thereby an enormous visual contrast. Thus, in this case Pipaluk Lake has manipulated the glass directly, in order to release precisely the shape and angles that give the piece character. By surrendering to the formative processes of the material on the one hand and, equally, using her own input in the finishing of the monolithic blocks, Pipaluk Lake demonstrates her mastery of dialogue with the material. She asks questions and listens to the answers that appear to emerge from the laws of physics – a direct glance into the mysteries of our existence.

Louise Mazanti
Art historian, Ph.d.

Translated into English by Alan Lake