Contemporary Canadian Glass

Venus Unleashes Her Vulcan Dogs. Kevin Lockau. Cast glass, cast aluminum, wood, pigments. 99x69x36 cm. Photo by studio105photography.com

By Kevin Lockau

I never could get through Cervantes’ allegorical classic. I have tried several times without creasing the spine. But I do have my sympathies or shared illusions with Don Quixote. Unlike Quixote, I am ‘deliberately’ trying to reinvent myself – twenty some years of working with cast glass, twenty of learning from students, twenty of making sculpture that asks questions about our culture. The only thing that I know for damn sure is that I know nothing with certainty. I couldn’t justify charging a windmill, and yet, here I am, tilting a bit.

Prior to this autumn, the Canadian conscious hit the ground running with the issue of global warming. We were over denial and taking it personally. It seemed like a bedrock shift had taken place. How we live, work, travel and consume was called into question and a carbon-footprint tag was annotated to just about everything.

When this current financial ‘crisis’ hit, fewer references to the environment held even a CBC audience, but at the time, and hopefully again soon, the public was talking green.

Christy Haldane, curator and glass artist, was actively walking the walk. It was her e-mail call for entry for a sculpture show challenging artists to use one of the ‘last six’ (or was it six hundred and sixty-six) materials that are destined to be land filled and not processed in even ambitious recycling programs that caught my attention. My private response was to critically look at the materials I use in my own sculptural work – especially glass. I began to feel more than a bit morally hypocritical.

Does the world need to burn fossil fuels to make decorative glass? The cullet to make that glass transported from where? China, for some. Coloured with German glass rods and powders, you cagily ventilate skyward because you know it’s foolish to breathe in the studio yet are OK to piss in the ocean of atmosphere? While environmental impact is applied to everything we do, it is more than symbolic when it is applied to your livelihood. It is more hypocritical when the objects we make of glass serve to reference the land and have some dialogue with issues of the environment. Yes, every activity has an impact, every material has its impact, but does the world need your creative skills and talents applied to this material?

While these questions are contemporary, they are not originally mine. My consciousness was awakened by (then) Sheridan students such as Sally McCubbin and the following year by Marcia Christie. As an instructor, I at first found the mire of environmental questioning very frustrating, and assumed bull-headedly and naively that it was symptomatic of creative stagnation – a virus that over-summered in the third year room. I never imagined that I myself would be infected when I took it home to work on sculpture full time. I don’t know if Stefan Dion ever visited the glass studio at Sheridan, but during the last federal election…for him a mutation of that virus proved fatal.

My ongoing series of sculptures inspired by Canadian landscape metamorphosed to become representative of my changing attitude and acceptance of the cultural greening and my own responsibility as a citizen. I believe one of the roles of any artist is to make visual the mythologies of our times; I wrestled with my sculpture to flesh this changing attitude, and especially to make it personal – if only for myself.

If art, and I include all arts, can create a discourse about who we are or, more importantly, of whom we aspire to be, it is of value to the greater society. Arts and culture in the broadest sense are important. Wasn’t this why we crowed indignant over Harper’s remarks about elitist chi-chi vernisages at the taxpayer’s expense? He was voicing the opinion that ‘Joe Plumber,’ or in my neighbourhood ‘Bob the Bushworker,’ and ultimately our Head of State, thinks that what we do is irrelevant. In many ways, he was right.

Joe Blow wouldn’t give a cold punty to the environment if he feels the big hand on his paycheck. That Joe Plumber thinks that renewable energy is fantastic as long as the wind turbines are out of sight of home and hunt-camp. That Bob the Bushworker is alienated, somewhat hostile and definitely suspicious of artists…’whatever it is that they do.’ And we have ourselves to blame.

The political morticians said that the Liberals (and, by default, the Greens) didn’t sell the green shift properly to Canadians. We, as creative people, as makers, artists, designers, craftspeople (it’s a big camp), don’t sell ourselves well to the broad public either. And if we don’t care about this – then we are elitists.

Most of the public taste is eighty years behind the times in painting and sculpture. If you think that as a maker of production glass that this doesn’t apply to you, then think again. As creative people, we all share the possibility and responsibility of what we make. Does the culture we live in value the ‘made by hand’? Does it appreciate or understand the design process behind the work, the materials used, or care about your concept? Whose voice speaks for the importance of what we do? Whose voice speaks for you? Is the voice local and organic (yours), or sold packaged and government approved (a council), or is it the iconic and global Chihully’s that even Bob the Bushworker has seen on TV? Whose face do your neighbours think of when they imagine an artist?

By accepting the full mantle of this creative life, we share in its potential. This challenge is not to be taken only for your ego, but to share your skills to strengthen the community in which you live. Your creative and problem solving skills could be invaluable not only to issues beyond the arts specialty but to your wider interests and concerns.

Our art and culture can define us as a nation and tilt our perceptions of beauty, of value or of being a citizen. That is work worth making. Perhaps that is worth a centimeter of melted permafrost.

Kevin Lockau is a sculptor in cast glass and granite. As well, he is resolving ideas using waste carpet and also waste milled wood. Volunteering free time, labour and skills has helped him find a sense of community in the Hastings Highlands in Ontario where he lives.