Chick (Charles) Butcher

by Robert Cook

Chick (Charles) Butcher’s horizon is his body. His work’s subject and content is as much about his body’s transformative encounters with his media as it is anything else. His earlier work (‘early’ being about 2000-2008) was made solely in glass and was almost masochistically labour intensive. It was not part of the (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.

Chick (Charles) Butcher, "Refusal to Be Anywhere," 2013, kilnformed and coldworked glass, 1.625 x 100.5 x 94 inches (installed)

Photo: D. Kvitka

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.

Chick (Charles) Butcher, "Finally, Direction," 2013, kilnformed and coldworked glass, steel, 78.875 x 22.75 x 17.75 inches

Photo: D. Kvitka