Creative Lives Talks: Alexandra Carr and Colin Rennie

This week I went to a talk by artists Alexandra Carr and Colin Rennie who both work in sculpture and often use glass as a medium. As I am planning to delve in to a bit of sculpture this semester I thought it would be a good opportunity to learn more about some contemporary sculpture I'd never seen. In the brief descriptions of their work beforehand both artists work with themes of nature and natural phenomena and the combination of science and art which were subjects I would like to know more about.

Going in to these talks I knew nothing about the artist's works but I was really impressed with some of it. My two favourite pieces that Carr discussed of her own work were 'Empyrean' and 'Ether.' Empyrean was inspired by the medieval cosmology theory of the spiralling sun in which they believed the sun rotated around the earth like a corkscrew. To represent this Carr created nesting spheres of gold dots that appeared and disappeared as you walked round the piece, creating an illusion and adding an interactive aspect that I liked as I'm interested in ways of making my work a bit more interactive with an audience. Overall the piece just looks so impressive and dramatic to me, a lot of her work has a real aesthetic value especially in this case because of the level of perfection and symmetry.

Empyrean was so accurate and planned extensively whereas Ether seemed to be a more spontaneous piece, made site specific for a cathedral within a week. Ether is made of 5km of nylon thread tied in to little knots and displayed across the cathedral space. At the sound of it I wasn't as impressed until I saw a photo and I loved it. The simplicity of the material was taken away once it was illuminated by a light and all this thread seemed to resemble some other-worldly organism that I thought just looked really beautiful and would have been an experience to see it in person.

Speaking of strange organisms, Colin Rennie created some of his own in more tentacle based forms. By the introduction about his 6 foot glass squids and his love of all things David Attenborough, I was sold. As the talk went on Rennie's recent work seems to have become more technology based and precise which wasn't as much my thing as his earlier works of pseudo- organisms that were curvy and free shapes which seemed to require less planning. His most recent exhibition which I seen at the National Glass Centre is pictured below.