A Narrative on Material Science in Art

writer:  sally resnik rockriver 

When I left a promising opportunity in science, I took experience with me. As a teen, I spent the summer doing genetic engineering. On the precipice of AIDS research,  high school students were afforded the opportunity to place a gene into a bacteria and make it immune to hydroxy urea. The evening news flashed images of electroflourises in a lab much like the one at the University summer program. However,  I was not compelled with a feeling that this would be  my future.

The laboratory did appeal to me as well as the whole concept of using chemicals to make real genetic changes.
We mixed solutions and suddenly the RNA chain was separated from the DNA. Then more chemistry placed a gene onto the chain. How was all that possible?
Meanwhile, I attended extracurricular art classes and found that at the age of 16, I was painting landscapes of other planets.  These passions seemed to be in opposition,  but to me they were obviously related.

As a potter, my mother had passed on a full vocabulary of glaze ingredients and running the equipment in her studio. She also instilled reusing scrap materials and practicing an honesty of process.
Her work appealed to a broad audience becuase she portrayed the lanscape we live in.

As a philosopher of math,  my father showed me the analytical and cultural predisposition of humans. He was involved in the question of whether numbers were "real". His books questioned the language of numbers and evaluated their relationship to the human definition.

These factors all lead to how I saw my artwork.

When I decided to pursue art, my first big solo project was to build a woodburning kiln. I appreciated the chemistry of wood ash turning into glass. In 1990, I found the ceramics department focused more on form, while i was interested in chemistry. I studied privately with Sally Prange to learn more glaze chemistry. Afterward,  I used a formula given to me by Al McCanliss and tought myself to grow crystalline glazes.
I rejected the pottery form and made flat paintings that were only about the chemical formation of the glaze. I called them "Geochemical Landscapes". I pushed away from the clay medium and began to believe that geochemistry as a topic in art was valid. I had already concluded that a sunset held universal communication. To me, the crystals I grew had a similar beauty. I thought, someone in a primitive culture in Africa could understand my work without any education in art history.

I lost my sense of smell for 20 years, starting at the age of 12. I was pretty sure that there were more than five possible senses or modes of perception.
We humans had five that responded to vibration waves, but what kind of senses did other beings have?
I wondered if aliens felt sunsets rather than seeing them.
Maybe these beings were an energy that could not be perceived by us....

I entered graduate school in 1993 with a few core beliefs. Science could be used as a form of communication. Scientific processes could be used to make art. There was more to the world than human perception. And that materials and processes did not need to be have a human narrative. They represented a real world of their own and the history of how they came to be.

In graduate school I found that my focus on process did not go deep enough for the rigorous conceptual  program. I pursued another type of  "universal". I built installation spaces in which I performed rituals. I was interested in the common human need to enact rites of passage to signify emotional transitions. I showed with performance artists and found an audience that wanted tp participate. They would make a hand impression out of clay, write a question about their life direction, and burn the paper in their clay imprint. I kept the hands and they were given a crystalline shard. I collected their signatures on an object that became symbolic of each ritual. 
Fellow MFA students also participated in the performances during class critiques,  and then gave their feedback on the implications. I documented two years of my personal and public activities and compiled them into a final video.
Alongside this practice, I continued with the pursuit of science as an art topic. I attempted to get the viewer to experience the microcosm and macrocosm of my crystal glaze landscapes. I presented this content using magnifying light boxes and color photo transparency wall lights. All had the theme that this object, presented in a different context,  could be from another planet. I printed black and white  details of my sculptures and enlarged them to 12 feet wide at human height. These were most convincing partly due to scale and  because they were easily identified as moonscapes.
(We still had little data from the rest of the Universe).

My final MFA installation was entitled "Science and Ceremony". I knew I had not perfectly unified the two approaches, but I showed all of the work together. This was a risk, because one project or the other stood strong, while the two intertwined was a far reach. I figured that graduate school was a portfolio of research and put it out there.  For myself, it was a record of all I believed in.

Because my work was prolific, unrefined,  and lacked a singular conceptual approach, I was not the standard picture of sucess in graduate school. I had a lot of supporters who were glad to see me chalkenge the status quo. Yet, I think they were glad that they weren't presenting such an outrageous display.  I'm still glad that I did Science and Ceremony. It was great training for large installation challenges to come.

I was not a "normal" MFA student. People didn't know if I was just interested in "spiritual stuff"  or if there was more to what I was saying. The way I stayed engaged in gradschool was through my ability to comprehend the required reading, discuss it, and use it effectively in critiques. I relied heavily on my understanding of art history and philosophy to remain envigorated. In fact, I enjoyed that so thoroughly, I never understood why my art had little reflection of my critical skills.

Ironically, I was the only one in my class to get a University teaching job. Be it noted that this was not due to all of my artistic extravagance. My professor had a contact at the job and they loved my crystalline glazes. The same work I made before graduate school was the main thing that captivated my employer and reflected professional skill. What did this say about my future?
Was my best work done at age 21, forever behind me? I still wonder...

It is important to note, that in the mid 1990's the union of art and science had not been popularized. Certainly in NYC art circles, it was far out. Not conceptual enough. Too heavily based in process. Contemporary art did not revistit an interest in materials until I  had a solo show in NY, 2002. By then, I was tired of trying to convince people that it was a valid topic.

It was at that teaching job that I had access to their glass blowing department. This was a natural next step I always wanted to take.
The only time I had blown was as a ceramics student.
After midnight, in 1989 at Penland,  some nice blowers let me make a cup with a small aqua murini pick-up. It was 1995 before I took my next gather.

I went straight for combining ceramic glazes with the hot glass. I frequently blew alone, due to not having enough time to assist and handle a full 5/4 teaching load while heading the ceramics department. Friday nights were my time, and I don't know how I surmised the energy.  The fire burned in me as I slept, dreaming of the experiments I had done that day. There was no stopping this.

I had a two year contract with an option to renew as head of glass and ceramics. (I could teach basic blowing, but there were certainly better
more deserving blowers).
When I teach, I dedicate myself fully to each student. I knew that I would not be satisfied with my performance as a teacher if I were to take sufficient time in art making.  I was not willing to relax my teaching standard in order to balance the two. I chose my artwork, at the cost of good career placement. I knew this was really crazy, throwing away the precise professional position that I would need to make it in art. It was a tough decision.

In summer of 1997, I moved back to my family homestead with a vague plan to open a glass blowing school that engendered the union of art and science. A series of fateful events allowed me to build the equipment and open for classes in the fall of 1998. I named the studio Resnik Thermal Lab. "Resnik", my last name at the time, "Thermal" for hot glass, and "Lab" implied scientific research.

In 2000, I became a visiting scholar at the UNC Chapel Hill Materials Science department. Thereafter followed a series of geochemical projects funded by the National Science Foundation.
The year 2000 marked a time when the concept of art and science was well-respected by the field of Science and still not as popular in the Arts. When I exhibited in Art and Science shows, I found that most of the art was made by scientists who were using their research material to make visual art. Many projects were illustrative, mapping, theoretical, and biological. Material Science as a topic was still a rarity.

For the years that followed, I either spoke to people who were in total agreement with my theories or to audiences that thought I was just coming up with an "angle". Many of my words fell on deaf ears, while those who appreciated my work, did not need to hear more.

In 2001, I went to a GAS conference at Corning, and informally discussed my use of ceramic reactions in hot glass.  William Gudenrath and Henry Halem, who I already knew, were the most interested in my work. However, no leads came from that conference. I donated a piece to the silent auction. It was a small assemblage of blown glass combined hot with ceramic glazes in an installed landscape format, entitled "Geode's Birthplace".
This piece was odd, especially displayed next to cobalt earrings and stained glass flowers, along with a few traditional studio art pieces. I was so naive and excited... I ran into Jack Wax, who I knew from Penland 1989, and said:
"I have a really unusual piece on the table, I hope you check it out!".
This piece received zero bids. No one would take it home for free.

I later donated it to the hotel used by Corning students. It was on display for a few years. In 2004,  Ceramics Monthly requested that I rephotograph it for their feature article, which would include a lot of my glass. The piece was gone. The hotel director of the display cabinet left the job and "cleaned out the case"...He was untraceable. Did he even exist? Did he throw it in the dumpster? Did he even like the piece? Was it ever displayed?

Still, it was a lucky event because it caused me to remake "Geode's Birthplace" which is now one of those pieces that I wonder if I will ever eclipse. The first version had everything in it that I would show today. But now, it might be acceptable in terms of content. The whole science and art question is no longer.  Combining outside materials with glass is standard.

The final chapter of this particular epic occured in summer of 2013. Since 2005, I had been making works that I referred to as "other planets."  I had this notion that there was a planet somewhere that had chemical reactions and materials similar to those used in my studio.

In 1996, I encapsulated ceramic salts in hot glass to create gas pressure that blows a metallic sphere. As the years passed, I started casting these into blown forms just before placing them in the annealer. I imagined these were crater lakes coated in sandy chemicals filled with glass that had salt raining from the sky. More glass was raining down to make the salt bubble. (My fantasy of what this work was doing extends way beyond the appearance of the pieces themselves.) Nonetheless, I called the current series "Thermal Storms".

My husband informed me that NASA had just discovered a planet that rained glass!  As I studied further, I found that my processes were very close to this Azure planet's atmospheric behavior.
I wasn't that far off after all...I had an upcoming solo show that I retitled,
"Unfound: the Glass Rains of Planet Azure".

I tell this story to any of you who wonder if the topics I encountered in the early 1990's ever took hold. I just saw a notice that RISD now teaches topics in the use of chemical science in art.

There has certainly been more funding available in the sciences. I even had a "crazy rich guy" offer to send me on his private flight into outterspace where I could conduct my experiments in an anti-gravity environment.
(After his spaceship was built).  I still would love to design such sn experiment, but I cannot say that the experiment itself is conclusively art.

Even though I have an interest in a post-or pre-human dialogue, I am still responsible for how I contextualize the processes of material science. Process and material alone may be a form of art for some, but that is not where my art ends. It is a means to a greater end. I still recognize that my current audience is human, and I value what my work means to them.

In my most recent show, the curator had not seen the work in person.
When she finally did, she gasped lightly and said "its just so breathtaking". I noticed a glow coming from the installation that does not translate in photos. After all of her theoretical words about other art in the show, all she said about mine was that "you sense this is a whole landscape from some other place. It works all together, but if you rest at any one point you find a microscopic world that is mesmerizing." She commented that it was easy to understand because my title, Otherworldy Specimens, was "quite literal".
I had not added a poetic or humanitarian slant. Does my straight foward simplicity make it less valuable as art? With my analytic mind, one might think I would have come up with something deeper.
But my intent is honest.

Some of my titles do allude to a narrative between the works, worlds, or in my personal life. However, I do not see that as a requirement. After all that I have just writren,  I am thinking that the true narrative is in the realism and fantasy of material science.
Without the distraction of validity,  I want to make new, (and hopefully better) work, regardless.
I have persisted all these years in the midst of criticism and disbelief. I require improvement in presenting my narrative,  but not in my core position.

I now see that much science has already infilterated art through parallel evolution. The efforts of others like myself have reached the next generation. Perhaps their road will be easier, likely with its own trials.

Thank you for reading,

Best,
Sally Resnik Rockriver
Alternative Critique. March 31 2014