|
All around me, things break-often by design and ultimately for my own good, I'm told. (Whether or not I'm riding in it at the time seems curiously beside the point.) People ail and die amid broad hints that, really it's their own fault.
What happens when I myself break down? How do I reconcile my finite fleshiness with technological wonders that become more physically invasive even as they recede, seemingly at the speed of light, beyond my conceptual grasp? Can I really believe bland profit-motivated assurances that the newest (a) hormones (b) emissions (c) procedures are perfectly safe, that there's really nothing to worry about? Amid this welter, trying to function responsibly, I wonder what choices in fact I have.
Thus bewildered, I pull my work together. I choose glass for its implied spiritual qualities of innocence and fragility, for its actual strength, toughness and adaptability-and because, having had the pleasure of creating something from the molten medium, I am then left with the question of what that something is now to do. I choose found objects for their character and traces of purpose, and precisely because they have been discarded, lost or forgotten. Intuitively, I begin to make connection between the "precious" glass and the "valueless" detritus, operating in some ways like a speculative archaeologist piercing together a long-dead, technologically remote past, and in some ways like a desperate survivor whose life might depend on this hastily-constructed, awkward and unlovely contraption.
By using my level of discomfort as a guide, I am trying (in spite of a desire to be politely, pleasantly agreeable-to say nothing of marketable) to produce work that physicalizes how I feel most of the time; like a disoriented hostage, or an unwilling accomplice in a process I didn't foresee, and from which I can't escape.
Walter Zimmerman
|
