Modern Alchemist: Mary Shaffer

Transforming Glass into High Art

"What if?" could be Mary Shaffer's motto. In an artistic career that spans nearly twenty years, Shaffer has always experimented, expressing, her curiosity through the medium of paint; with installations making use of odd materials, fire, and electricity; and, perhaps most consistently, with glass.

Although trained as a painter, since 1972 Shaffer has been fascinated by glass. At the time she was living in Providence, Rhode Island, and her paintings focused on light as it came through windows: "I was very attracted to windows and windows and window light and also to the symbol. . . of a woman in a house bound by children, looking through the window, the window being freedom or a visual freedom in any case, or a barrier, a gentle barrier."

Shaffer further explored her interest in light and the effects of moving light by making wooden stretchers for her paintings, which created an undulating surface like curtains moving in the breeze in light. Then glass artist Fritz Dreisbach, who was teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), suggested that she use slumped glass to create a curved surface. Slumping is a technique use in industry to make windshields, among other things, and involves heating glass to the temperature where it becomes malleable but not yet liquid. The glass, which is placed over a form, then sags to conform to the contours of the mold. The form is retained when the temperature of the oven or kiln is lowered.

Autonomous works

Shaffer's first experiments were with plate glass slumped over metal bars to make wavelike configurations. Although originally conceived of as a support for painting, they became autonomous works: "I just started working directly with materials. It was wonderful freedom to be working with tangible things instead of imaginary space as in a painting."

Her interest in glass as a material strengthened during a vacation in Rome the following summer, when Shaffer worked on an installation piece to show the effect of heat rising as seen through glass. She placed a heat element behind a sheet of glass and shone lights on it, and the rising air made a pattern on the wall. Shaffer then wondered

What it would be like to crack the glass. So I cracked it and saw these wonderful wild cracks made by heat, much different than impact cracks, which are just pretty straight.. . . One of the pieces of glass fell and stuck to the heat element. There it was, touching one side at 1800 degrees Fahrenheit and the other side an ice-cold, wet wall, and it wasn't continuing to crack and I thought "My God, what a strong material. If it can do this. . . it can do a lot more than people are letting it do."

Exploration of Glass

Back in Providence, Shaffer's life began to allow for her exploration of glass. Dale Chihuly, perhaps the best-known American glass artist working today, was a friend. As head of the glass department at RISD, he gave Shaffer access to the glass studios.

The early 1970s were a time when many artists were more concerned with process than with the final product, defying the gallery system that existed on salable objects. The mood in the glass world, however, was different. Although glass has a five thousand-year history, it was not until 1962 that artists in America began to work with the medium to express themselves creatively, rather than to meet industrial demands. Up until then, glass had been too demanding technologically and too expensive for artists to work within small studios.

It took the combined efforts of a potter, Harvey Littleton, and a scientist and artist, Dominick Labino, to change this. In 1962 Littleton organized two landmark workshops at the Toledo Museum of Art to demonstrate how glass could b melted in an inexpensive furnace, converted from a ceramics kiln, and blown. Labino, director of research for the Johns-Manville Company, contributed a glass with a lower melting point, thus completing the basic technology that permitted the creation of small studios.

It was the seemingly magical process of glassblowing that captured the imaginations of the early studio glassworkers. Most were obsessed with mastering the technique, in awe of the level of skill evidenced in European blown glass. Shaffer had never blown glass, but had always been fascinated by the process, experimenting with commercially available plate glass. As Shaffer puts it, "Curiosity said, 'What happens when you put the glass on top of nails? What happens when you string it up with wires? What happens when you fold it over something?"

This attitude was not shared by many glassworkers, who "were most excited to be blowing glass." Concerned with the "correct" glass-working methods, shaffer's colleagues were constantly telling her that what she was attempting was impossible, but Shaffer persisted. She set up situations to find out how glass would react under various conditions. Shaffer was curious about combining glass with metal, balancing sheets of it over objects such as hooks, chains, and nails to make sculptures that recorded the process of heating and cooling.

The found metal supports were at odds with the delicacy of the slumped glass that draped over them like fabric; the effect was of pain, but these works were not expressions of angst. "It wasn't 'Can I make a brutal piece?' but 'can I put two sheets of cold glass on one point and have it heat up enough to make it a hole in the glass and drape around the hook?' " Shaffer then made the Hanging series; wire grids holding plate glass that responded to gravity when heated, and dripped through the wire. Shaffer sees these works as symbols of "gentle bondage" and feels they are related to her paintings about light, with the wire grid recalling windows. To her, they seem like windows in a darkened room.

Manipulating Glass

These first works done in the 1970s and early 1980s made use of found objects, such as wire scavenged from the street or discarded spikes and nails. The metal forms were "givens," not invented. The glass shapes were, however, new. "Working with slumped glass initially, there was no reference because people weren't making these kinds of shapes." Since Shaffer does not manipulate the glass during the slumping process, the shapes were also natural, the direct result of heat applied to glass and of the effects of the force of gravity. She believes very strongly that the work is a collaboration with nature: "I set up a structural system that allows the glass to help determine its own shape."

The organic quality of these early works gave way to more structure in the bundled pieces Shaffer was also working on. Taking sheets of plate glass, she stood them in the kiln and heated them to the point where they fused together and began to slump and curl over. The rigidity of the glass played off against its malleability, a study in compression and tension. The next series was the Off Ledges, which were similar to the Bundles, but the stacks of glass were positioned on a shelf and allowed to droop over the edge.

Size is an issue that sculptors using more conventional materials rarely address in the same manner that artists working with glass must. Glass does have practical size limitations. Large-scale work is a technical as well as an aesthetic challenge. As early as 1977, Shaffer was involved in work in glass that defied the physical limitations of the material. A piece she nicknamed Custer's Last Stand was an eighteen-foot glass column with forty-penny nails, eight inches sections. From a distance it looks like a ribbon of light, but on closer inspection, the nails jut out aggressively. Yet as it fits into a corner, it expresses the futility of the menace.

Couple, from the same year, expanded the Hanging series to six feet tall. Again, glass was slumped in a grid of wire, crudely twisted together and sticking out like "exposed nerve endings," to use Shaffer's words. It is a strong commentary on human relationships. In Path, done in 1982, Shaffer slumped twenty-four-inch by twenty-four-inch sheets of plate glass and then stacked them in a staggered configuration that slunk thirty feet across the gallery. Here Shaffer pointed up the paradoxical quality of transparent glass: It formed the structure of the piece and yet was "invisible."

In 1983, while teaching at New York University, Shaffer began the wall-mounted Ganesh and the Mamoure series. At first she used clay and later cast metal architectonic shapes as the organizing structure, rather than found objects, and wire. These works mark the beginning of a new phase of Shaffer's development as she became more of an object-maker. Ganesh, referring to the elephant-headed Hindu god, features long drapes of slumped glass issuing from a cast metal geometric form; the sweeps of glass resemble an elephant's trunk. The Mamoure series is named after a river in South America, a name picked at random from the dictionary, but which is fitting, as Shaffer uses glass to "flow" from the metal structures.

The works in these two series illustrate quite clearly the distinctions between scale and size. Even at six inches tall, they are positively monumental in impact. When Shaffer began the series, she overheard one of her students commenting to another that she must be planning to build a city. Shaffer said, "I want them big, but that was a little bigger than I had planned."

Tabletop Tricks

In an exhibition last year at O.K. Harris Gallery in New York, Shaffer installed works from this series at eye level on ledges so the viewer perceived them as from a distance, confronting them on their scale. The maquette seems to translate to twelve feet or larger, the size that Shaffer intends them to be: "Maybe it's from childhood, playing with little toys. We know that little trucks translate into big trucks. They don't translate into a tabletop truck."

In these works, Shaffer sets up a dialogue between the two materials--glass and metal. The cast metal represents solidity, density, and containment, while the glass represents fluidity, spirit, and movement. Of course, the materials also share a common birthplace--the crucible.

These points are made even more strikingly in the later Inversion series, in which she takes the glass and metal compositions of the Mamoure series and executes them reversing the materials. For example, in House on Fire, a solid rectangular block of cast metal has three slitlike openings that are filled with glass. In its Inversion series counterpart, the block has become cast glass and the openings are filled with metal cast into flamelike fingers. Although the glass is now dense, it is still permeable by light; but the metal is no longer stable and enduring--it has been transformed into a mercurial expression of anguish. Glass, which represented flame struggling to consume a cast metal structure, has become a block of ice vulnerable to heat.

Although Shaffer plans eventually to execute these maquettes full size, she must face financial reality: "They have to be bought first." Thanks to commissions, Shaffer has been able to execute her works on a large scale. In 1982 the Huntington Museum of Art in West Virginia commissioned Shaffer to do an outdoor work, Water-Way. Measuring six feet by two feet by thirteen feet, undulating sheets of slumped glass spring off a brick wall to rest on a tile pedestal, like a waterfall frozen in time and space.

Shaffer's most recent commission is for a "retrofitted" building in Washington, D.C., at 1800 M Street, NW, for the developer Oliver Carr. Shaffer is working with the architects Keyes, Condon, and Florance on two walls to be installed in April of this year that will dominate the lobby of the office building. When approached by art consultant Jean Efron, Shaffer was told that the format for the two walls would be a grid based on one-foot by two-foot and one-foot by three-foot panels and that Flutex, an architectural patterned glass, had already been chosen by the architects for the lobby walls. Using these givens, Shaffer also decided to use the Flutex glass and designed two ten-foot by twelve-foot walls, Wind-Wall and Cast Air.

New York Subway

Wind-Wall, which will be seen from a distance on entering the building, consists of approximately two-foot by three-foot modules of glass that are being slumped at the Bent Glass Factory in Queens. Shaffer says she "found the solution to that project in the subway in New York, probably because in the subway in New York you want fresh air. It was conceived in one fell swoop.

These details take time, as Shaffer spends hours on the phone talking to manufacturers and suppliers to determine the limitations of the materials and often to cajole them into adapting their products to her needs. This may mean having a special production run or getting companies to do something they have never done before.

For the 1800 M Street commission, Shaffer wanted to play with glass as a metaphor for air and wind. In Wind-Wall, the horizontal stripes of the Flutex glass become more vertical, sweeping diagonally across the surface to the upper right where the wall swells, giving the impression of wind literally pushing out the wall. Cast Air is a quieter piece, with bubbles of air captured in layers of glass, each 3/16 of an inch thick, picking up the colors of the building's marble floor and the gold-tone elevators.

Because of the reflective nature of glass, the building's visitors and workers will experience a changing surface as they move past the walls. The time of day and year and the amount of light entering the building will also alter the viewer's perception of Shaffer's walls. "People will pass the walls as they go to and from work and will see new things over time. The delight should be cumulative."

For Shaffer, public art should "intrigue the viewer in the same way that the viewer in the same way that the artist is excited by his interest in the material, by his own curiosity. The viewer has to be brought into the same kind of curiosity and excitement and sense of playfulness." Curiosity and experimentation continue to fuel Shaffer's artistic imagination. Talking about another commission that is technically unresolved after several months of work, Shaffer is still challenged, even obsessed: "I have an instinct about the materials; I know when it can work. Because of this curiosity, it's taken me to physics and science and it's taken me to alchemy." Like the medieval alchemist transmuting base metals into gold, Shaffer transforms plate glass into art.