Artist Statement
My work celebrates color, light, and time. My practice is color as a moment of movement, in both glass making and painting. For me, painting is a construction, it reflects the innate force of sculpture within me. By folding and enclosing the canvas, the painting exists but is hidden beneath layers: it is a mystery.
Glass is an actual physical object and also an idea, a material where light has a natural voice. Light is contained within glass, which gives rise to qualities of color and form that are unique to glass. Actual positive/negative space engages with volumetric glass space. One slides into the other, shifting from the picture plane to the sculpted form. Color and light jump from real space to glass space, which is a transparent volume. Each sculpture evolves and is an idea that matures over time.
I grapple with and have accepted the patience needed to work with glass. Finishing glass is a time-consuming process and forward motion is slow. The reward is not immediate. It is necessary to see down the road, around the corner, into the future, to maintain the commitment to finish the piece.
The density of the sculptures made at the furnace conceals an unknowable mix of movement and fluidity frozen in situ during the creation of the solid piece. When the block is cut open, the layers of clear and colored glass separate. The disparate combinations of color and pattern that emerge to create a new idea is often an unexpected result.
My paintings mirror the sculptural process of cutting apart and rebuilding, a combination of two-dimensional and three-dimensional thought. My work in painting and sculpture is an ongoing discovery, an unexpected journey without a predetermined destination. I continue to expand as an artist, with confidence and freedom.
About
Christine Barney
My background in glass goes back to my childhood. I was born and raised near Corning, New York, where my father, a physicist, worked for the Corning Glass Works in research and development. An early memory from my childhood is playing “hide and seek” with my brothers in the Corning Museum of Glass. This was in the nineteen fifties, when the museum was dark and quiet with infrequent visitors. After rambling amidst the museum exhibits, we would watch in amazement as the Steuben glassblowers fashioned sculptures from glowing orbs of glass.
Many years later on Murano, my family history was vital in my acceptance as a student in Italy where glassmaking is a family business. A two-year apprenticeship from 1985 – 1987 with Livio Seguso taught me to concentrate on my own relationship with glass as a unique material. In the Seguso factory, I learned how to design for production as well as the fundamentals of sculpture at the furnace.
I have received two fellowships from Wheaton Arts in Millville, New Jersey, and two visual arts fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. I have completed private and public commissions. My work has been featured in numerous galleries, as well as national and international expositions, since 1979. My sculpture is included in the permanent collections of the Corning Museum of Glass, the Museum of American Glass, Merck & Co., Tropicana Products and Centeon Pharmaceutical as well as many private collections.
My sculpture is featured in the books The Sculpture Reference by Arthur Williams, Women Working in Glass by Lucartha Kohler, Glass Art from Urban Glass by Richard Yelle, and Art Glass Today 2 by Sandra Korinchak.