This year, we are partnering with the Gardiner Museum
and the Humber School of Creative and Performing Arts to present a joint project called
Future City – an imaginary public square of a future Toronto, if it were run by artists. In this future city, your civic responsibility is to give a little art in order to get a little art.
In DD’s corner of the City is “Nice Bumping Into You,” co-created by spoken word artists Heather Hermant and glass artist Melina Young, and we asked them explain the installation in their own words. Here is part two of a three-part interview we’ll be posting this week.
DD: How did you make the glass tiles? What was the experience like?
Melina: We had lots of fun making the tiles. I had a basic design in mind that would represent meeting,gathering, exchange. We wanted it to be full of colour so that people would want to play, with colour, with the image, with the text and with the glass itself. I approach glass as a plastic medium and always create by feel. The scale, the shapes and images are as organic as the process. The approximately hundred tiles assembled make up an image of a kind of cell measuring about ten square feet.
Heather: Melina's work is really organic. In the process and in the outcome. The works are really flowing, you feel the life in them. Most people who have responded to the glass tiles for Nice Bumping Into You so far haven't gotten beyond the wow factor in concrete words. But my sister did and I love her response: "They look like a cross between cellular activity and press-on nails." There's definitely something of the micro and the macro in them, something of the abstract and the more literal or concrete, something of the contemplative and the more lighthearted.
I was Melina's assistant in the creation of these tiles. I don't know what it says about me, but there is nothing quite so exhilarating as smashing beautiful glass to ever smaller bits with a hammer. That's where we started. Making fused glass with Melina is really physical. It's a kind of drawing that she does, she has an idea of the design, but the picture is really created in response to the material in hand and how it happens to land into the design when she pours it. What's so interesting about the smash-up is how beautiful the broken pieces are at every stage of the crushing--this is metaphorical material for a poet!--I didn't want to lose a single little fragment, they looked like jewels the smaller they got. It was really something new for me, not being afraid of shards of broken glass, which has been my engagement with broken glass until now.
And then, how Melina makes the pieces fall is just really gorgeous to watch. The tiles that were laid out to be put in the kiln were insanely detailed, piles of minute pieces of glass, held together delicately by their own weight and a little glue. It was a really delicate process getting them into the kiln one at a time. That was my job. The pre-kiln image was an entirely other universe than the
fused works that ultimately came out. I feel like Melina made two pieces. It's the end piece that she has in mind, but to get there, there's this interim stage that's pretty breathtaking too. I think the excitement of the unexpected permeates Melina's process. And I think and hope that that will be the spirit of the evening at Gardiner, as the piece becomes other pieces once people step up to the table.
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