14.1.15

Small crystals series (black and white)































Working on this scale seems to make more sense than the previous (A2) collages, arranging and re-arranging shards of paper until they coalesce into a new form small enough to fit into the palm of a hand. Looking as I work for a sense of 'glassiness', if that is possible from paper, some layerings suggesting reflectivity, translucency more than others...

Having left and returned to unstuck works in progress, edges have begun to curl away from their grounds creating slight shadows and hints of three-dimensionality. A next step, then, may be to make these as reliefs in card...


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Even before the end of the war, in 1917, Taut began to work on his first "glass fantasies." By 1918 they had grown into a portfolio of drawings, which was published the following year under the title Alpine Architektur. In these wonderfully lyrical renderings crystalline configurations spread over entire mountain valleys and chains. Here glass was no longer merely a thin, water-clear skin that helped dematerialise architecture or integrate interior and exterior; it was crystalline, cut like gems, shone with noble brilliance, and was charged with all the symbolism of a romantic medievalism.
- Christian W. Thomsen, Visionary Architecture, p.82