(mythic) balletic light stepping and lyrical lifting and blowing of the hot shop. Instead, his works emerged from weeks of grinding heavy-as-hell kilnformed objects on various grades of frits. Each work he made was a record of labour, the chart of a longitudinal relationship with the specific and gradually shifting weight of glass. The process changed his body (moulding bone and muscle structure) as if he too were a medium. In concert with this, the work outside of his body existed as juxtapositions of relative opacity and translucency that were created by the balance of thin/light and thick/heavy glass. Weight and its visual gradations, therefore, articulated our particular experience of light. Seen as a whole practice (body and object combined) the human is connected to the physics of light - Charles’s own body being a tacit medium for the motility of perception. And so, we can see that such work was entirely phenomenal - it was connected with a will to ‘act as vessel’. More recently, Charles has started to complicate and twist this imperative. He now uses materials with the same kind of bodily intent, but there is more narrative involved, and in a sense his questioning is given more freedom to be itself than previously. I think what is happening is that the thoughts and inquiries circling in his head while he was grinding out his earlier work have now become a more overt content lode; the dynamics latent in earlier work are now manifest, brought into the realm of symptom - part of its structure and its surface. For instance, in one work he rusted an outline of himself, that, over time, oozed downwards, somehow charting his own mortality: the increasingly hazy outline became a shroud (and it slumps) and a washed out and forgotten crime sketch. In other works he employs steel that he has sunk in close water bodies to promote oxidisation and its decay, to make apparent the mortality of the apparently non-organic. In all of these works the end point of the human, death, is overtly heralded and rendered material. Intriguingly, as I was thinking about writing this essay, Charles
sent me a picture of his body inside one of the works and it was exactly like a tomb. The intention was to give a sense of scale, and maybe was meant in humour too. But as Freud pointed out, the joke reveals the workings of the unconscious. His work is a form of opening and a form of erasure, death and life, coming together, his body pinned between them, breathing against, from, and into both. It makes sense, then, that there are references to crucifixes in the work too. These are not utilised as celebrations of Christian faith, however. Charles employs them as question marks. He asks, what is this trajectory of faith and its utterances? What does it have to do with him? Does it signify closure or opening? And, ‘hanging’ over these concerns is the implied body of Christ, framed and damaged, located in direct relation to the earth and the heavens. I think we see in Charles’s work, therefore, a ‘between state’, always searching and framing and locating his attempts to understand the way his body moves and should move in relation to some kind of ‘purpose’ against brute is-ness/materiality.
Each work is a different moment in a separation from the world, and a different entry into the internal world. Cobi’s horizon is equally voiding, but is less apparently about the struggle of body against matter. It is more about the eyes and the imagination. As I noted above, her work starts from a will-to-silence. Superficially, falling into her work is a way of falling into some personal space. However, this personal space exists not simply in a sealing-off, but with a fusing-with a bigger real and/imaginary force/space. Her work creates an encounter with an enveloping other. Because of this, fusion is key (metaphorically and technically) to her making. Each work is made from layers of cane that are laid alongside each other and fused. And one of the aesthetic pleasures of the work is the way that the
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