Artist Spotlight

‘Inside, Outside/Fleshy, Cr ystalline’: get to know the work of Katie Dye

Kira Houston Special to Worcester Magazine USA TODAY NETWORK

Artist Katie Dye might say that other sculptural mediums have “transparency issues.” For Dye, the ethereal, colorchanging properties of glass make it a joy to work with and look at. Her puzzling glass objects draw us in with their vitality. Take “Tabidus”: the milky orange interior and dripping arteries make this glass heart look alive, as if it might begin to pulse in our peripheral vision. Dye draws from the human body, which she freezes mid-motion and mid-transformation. She blurs the lines between interiors and exteriors, excavating internal organs while encasing extremities. Her enigmatic creations unsettle our sense of inertia, convincing us for a moment that the inside, the outside, the fleshy, and the crystalline might all intermingle.

Dye has always considered herself a maker, recalling fondly the three-dimensional mud sculptures she built as a child. She still uses a stool in her studio gifted to her by an influential high school art teacher. Dye studied studio process at MassArt where she met and fell in love with glass. We might be familiar with the aesthetics of blown glass, a sculptural process Dye described as something like “dancing.” Dye, however, prefers the lesser-known process of kiln casting. She uses a method called “lost wax” to tame the glass in the kiln. This ancient form of casting has evolved to employ a modern plaster recipe containing silica. An artist working in this method first creates a wax model of the intended sculpture, encases this model in plaster, then melts the wax, leaving a hollow mold. Dye produces her glass objects through this mold-making process, letting the technicalities of craft guide her to new shapes and forms.

While “Tabidus” was cast from an anatomical model (no dissection required), Dye also engages in a type of indirect self-portraiture by using her own body to create molds. She uses a material called alginate to safely make casts of her limbs. In her series “Transpositions,” she encases negative-space imprints of her own hands and feet in natural glass artifacts. In “Transposition 6,” for example, the inverted texture of the artist’s fingers becomes encased in a cocoon of crystal blue. The surrounding glass object appears spontaneous, but at the right angle, light illuminates the fossilized fingers. To ensure this essential illumination, Dye usually builds her own lighted pedestals to display her works. Viewers must interact with the glass’s transparent properties to piece together the visual puzzle pieces. Interiors and exteriors harmonize to evoke a sense of suspended motion. Dye’s glass freezes the body in action, but it also embodies action. In her dynamic composition Stretch, the hands seem like they might wiggle their digits and pull the red string at any moment. Bodily images, dissociated from their limbs, prompt a consideration of the contradiction between the glass’s inert reality and seeming vitality. The aura of delicate suspended motion which Dye cultivates both fascinates and mystifies our roaming eyes.

This interplay between vitality and stasis, or life and death, is key to reading Dye’s work. Dye follows in a long tradition of sculpting the human body, and as early as 900 BCE, when Olmec artists created one of the first sculptures of the human heart referenced from a human sacrifice, bodily sculpture has associated itself with death. The ancient Romans and various subsequent cultures created death masks by taking imprints of the deceased’s face. Due to a phe-

“Tabidus,” cast glass, 3” x 5” x 2.5”

KATIE DYE/ARTSWORCESTER “Somnus,” cast glass and pigment,

5” x 7” x 2.5” KATIE DYE/ARTSWORCESTER nomenon known as the “hollow face illusion,” a backward-facing mask appears forward-facing to the human eye, even despite contrary visual cues. The Romans used this illusion to devise hollow death masks which seemed to shift between convex and concave positioning, convincing viewers they had seen a ghost. Today, Dye utilizes the active properties of glass to produce this same shifting vitality. Her casts seem to defy death, appearing moments from reanimation even when the viewer knows the material is inert.

Through their shifting, ethereal qualities, Dye’s sculptures transform our traditional ways of viewing the world. They capture a sense of fragile preservation, but also an impetus to motion. They ask us to investigate multiple levels of texture, finding hidden forms inside the glass. They appropriate familiar bodily images to produce uncanny metamorphoses. Like the Roman death masks which floated spectrally in candle-lit tombs, Dye’s sculptures seem to stretch, grab, transfigure, and glow. Her playful creations let us see past dichotomies — between the inside and outside, the fleshy and crystalline, the living and dead, the vital and inert — to imagine how our own preconceived incongruities might meld and reconfigure through art.

“Art History 201: Art, the Public, and Worcester’s Cultural Institutions,” at Clark University gives students the opportunity to work closely with regional contemporary artists. With individual artists from ArtsWorcester’s gallery programs, the students hone their visual and critical skills by producing short essays positioning the artists’ work within contemporary art history. This year, the students also curated small selections of their artist’s work for these online spotlights. This collaboration was funded by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.