Corning Museum Shows Work by Australian Artist Tim Edwards

Thursday, 02 November 2006 16:10

Corning, NY – Tim Edwards, an Australian-born artist, is the recipient of the 2006 Rakow Commission of The Corning Museum of Glass.  Each year the Museum awards the Commission to realize a significant new work of art incorporating the medium of glass.

His commission, Drift, a pair of earth-toned vessels covered with an asymmetrical design, was unveiled in the Museum’s Sculpture Gallery.

“For this year's Rakow Commission, I chose to focus on the vessel, rather than on sculpture," says Tina Oldknow, curator of modern glass at The Corning Museum of Glass.  "I wanted to bring attention to the subjects of the intersection of craft and design and studio artists working within industry.  These are trends of special interest right now.”

Edwards sees beauty in the simple metal parts of complicated machines, in stones, and in the random, chance occurrence of patterns in the environment.  He captures these shapes in a journal, and draws and re-draws them until they become his own.  His patterns in glass recall the patterns of cultivated fields or rock and cloud formations.

Drawing from these inspirations, he creates patterns to be used on his sculptures.  He is best known for his pairs of minimal, rectangular vessels, separated by a visually charged gap of air, whose abstract, asymmetrical decoration covers the front and back of the forms.

Edwards applies colored glass to the vessels while they are worked at the furnace.  Once the glass has cooled and he has drawn the design onto the pieces, he spends hours at the wheel, carefully cutting and paring away the outer surface of the colored glass to reveal the transparent glass beneath, creating a pattern.  The soft, almost blurred edges of the vessels and their surface texture are also achieved through patient cutting.