Contemporary Canadian Glass

Cardiac, Kevin Lockau, 2008

By Kevin Lockau

It must have been July the fourth. I was a TA at Pilchuck and it was final critique day for the casting class under instructor Henner Schroder. I have a vivid recollection of one student’s work on the table. I can’t remember what the casting looked like, but I do remember the colours of red and white and blue and stars and stripes in the sculpture. I can’t say for certain, nineteen years on – or if my memory is embellishing – but to defend the work, the student started to sing “God Bless America.”

You’re serious, I asked incredulously.

He looked at me like I was from another planet, and maybe I was, because the impression that still haunts me was this. No Canadian would ever make a piece like that. No red and white, maple leaves, and definitely no ‘O, Canada,’ and defend it with brash patriotism.

Just no way.

So what defines Canadian glass? Art glass, production glass, design, flat glass, architectural glass, and … beads, all could be examined. What defines Canadian or Canadian anything? Now Br’er Rabbit, there’s a big ball of tar for you. Your instinct tells you not to go there. At the most primitive, the conversation becomes how we are not Americans – and with a hopeful messianic figure as their new Commander in Chief, we want to keep things, well…polite.

I shouldn’t actually be writing on this topic without first consulting glass artists with a much more experienced opinion. Immediately artists such as Katherine Gray, Tolly Jones, Laura Donefer, Koen Vanderstukken, Kris and Eva at Tsunami, come to mind for a knowledgeable perspective. And if I thought for a further two seconds, my voice would be near the very bottom of any list. How Canadian of me. My intent, as this magazine goes on-line, and in the spirit of its’ humble beginnings under (then editor) Ben Goodman – where this was a comfortable place to give a good rant among friends – is to not phone these excellent sources to paraphrase their input, but the conversation that ensues should be public and inclusive. I hope to get the big ball of tar going, and get out of the way. I think it is an important topic to at least question, and it doesn’t get rolled around much in our circles, perhaps because of our own self-interest.

Does this identity of ‘Canadian’ even matter? (It’s ok, WD-40 takeoff both tar and pine sap.) I assume one of the mandates of this magazine is to represent Canadian glass internationally. One expects the label does make a difference from a marketing perspective, especially when the dollar was comparatively lower in value. But I return to the tar-ball question – is our glasswork, the best of what we create, unique in the world of glass?

My response, in a word, is NO.

Love it or rebel against it. As a nation, most of our non-elite culture streams unfettered across our southern international border. We don’t have time to even hit the mute button. Most of our population is stuck near the chalk line snapped on the continent by the Oregon Treaty like settled flakes in a snow globe. It’s too bad we don’t have more close and powerful neighbours. It could balance things out. Being squeezed between a rock and several hard places makes home look pretty green. But the intangible vastness of the Atlantic to the east and the Pacific to the west makes both old Europe and the Orient seem like distant friends. And heck, the North is all ours to mythologize. It’s the only direction left that we can go to step back and away. Our national identity isn’t an island one, a culture fortress with a moat like that of Australia or Cape Breton. Our identity isn’t even singular, it’s multiregional. The differences of identity between regions of distance, language, oil and history might only be surpassed by the urban-rural divide. We have many voices, many stories; increasingly ours is a global identity. Three cheers for multicultural Canada.

However, being increasingly multicultural isn’t particularly unique in the world. Applied to a technical level of glassmaking, the Italian, Venetian method of glass blowing circled the world like Columbus. Czech Republic kiln casting techniques, Swedish sandcasting, Australian fusing, all came to the new world, blowing from the west like an Alberta clipper. Technique has a multinational label. While it is inappropriate to give the expertise of a glass technique solely a national identity, like any good immigrant culture, we took it in and accepted it as gospel.

It is in Canada’s good fortune to be geographically close to the Pilchuck School, the epicentre of multinational technique on this continent and perhaps the world, which makes it easier for Canadians to attend. While our regional glass schools have their historic strengths arising from their particular institutional programs and from the individual passions of their faculty, Pilchuck (add Penland and Haystack to a lesser degree) enhanced the learning curve. The experience of attending a Pilchuck course also opened the door filled – with blinding light to what the rest of the world was doing in your field – not just from luminary instructors, but also from talented students abroad.

In a United Nations of culture and creativity, you quickly find others that share your passion and your mythologies; stories that you thought were the bedrock of being Canadian. The Landscape that shapes you, an identity that struggles to catch its breath against a monolith, a painful relearning of lost memories, a quiet sense of poetic solitude are also told in the works of other glass artists in other places around the world. Borders do not limit great themes and good work. Play the game of ‘find the Canadian’ in a survey of international glass. If you don’t know the artist, you may be surprised.

Twenty years ago, it was said, perhaps not so facetiously, that if the glass sculpture had stones or bones in it…it must be Canadian. I’ve even used damn beaver chewed sticks in glass sculpture, and today my work is still inspired by shield landscape. Artists around the globe are equally inspired, and sometimes use stone or bone. As Canada becomes more and more urban, more culturally diverse, Northrop Frey’s Idea of the North becomes more and more… an idea. With Internet communications, travel, immigration and green cards, where you are from is less of a question than where are you now.

So what’s left? My hands are as tarred as an oil sands retaining pond. Where does that leave our patriotic romanticism? Is there nothing uniquely ours to define or differentiate what we make as ‘Canadian’? There is a part of our Canadian mythos that may be of help. The Lester Pearson legacy distinguishes Canadians with the reputation of being diplomatic, peace brokers and having the ability of finding compromise and common ground on the world stage. I did use the word ‘mythos’ intentionally, for where it may be suffering politically it may be a virtue for its citizens to maintain. The beauty of having so many creative voices, so many stories, so many technical skills to draw from is that the benefits of working collaboratively are wealthier. Setting aside a part of your creative time and artistic ego to join skills and trade vision with another has, for me, always given more rewards in return than I could have foreseen. Intentionally and indirectly, all the most satisfying projects that I have been part of in my career were done with varying degrees of collaboration. Dangerous Art was an ambitious OCA (Ontario College of Art) collective.  The Glass Architecture Project with Alfred Engerer at the helm put me to work with architect Paul Syme of Toronto (and there can be no better challenge of how you see your material than to work with a non-glass creative person).

Brad Copping and I did an exhibition where we traded components in their early stages for the other to take in their own direction.  I have worked with furniture-maker and canoe-tripper Andrew Reesor on sculpture components and taken much needed design criticism. I continue to work with master blacksmith Duerst, trading components back and forth for reworking till we are both satisfied. Anyone who has a spouse who is an artist is fully aware of the important input that the working relationship can give to each other’s personal artwork. One should also recognize as well the grey area of collaboration, from design to completion, of employee input. I am reminded of William Morris’s blunt words as he entered the Harbourfront Glass Studio for the first time to give a demo, “You guys are crazy if you blow alone.” Times have changed. The potential here is for more than a shared studio, equipment and expenses, an extra set of hands to help punty-up.  A true collaboration creates greater than the sum of the parts.

Targeted thematic group exhibitions should not be confused with collaboration. As a rule, participating artists are picked from a line-up like a neighbourhood game of pond shinny, but no one actually gets to play “as a team.” No strategy, no practice, no passing, no scoring, just show up for the game with your stick. It’s all puck hogs. We are too comfortable in the mold and market that we create around our personal work and defensive of our artistic persona. To be represented outside of these constructed confines of identity assumes risk and a loss of immediate control. Private galleries that market your work are also most comfortable where the authorship of creation is well-defined and hierarchical and fits recognizably into the artist’s Body of Work. While a collective may have a faster divorce rate than collaborating couples, they are cauldrons of creativity and critique (and sometimes politics), which influence is far lasting in effect. Collaboration has no rules. It is a process of evolution that is different for each participant, each project. It can dump you unceremoniously with a negotiated settlement into a foreign but more vastly stimulating landscape.

Could the nation that cradled the Six Nations, the Group of Seven, Painters Eleven, General Idea, Fastwurms and coalition governments be a leader in collaborative creativity? Could an identity that boasts these skills foster creative momentum that weaves regional voices within Canada? Abroad? Could our voices speak from a shared passion not merely wrapped in a red and white flag of marketing? Could the Glass Art Association of Canada be the architecture for the complex logistics? Perhaps it is in our national psyche to make the possibility of collaboration a virtue and, in time, be internationally recognized for a collective process of making and publically shared authorship beyond the excellence of the glasswork itself.