Vapors is an installation of seven standing metal forms holding clear etched lung-like sacks made of glass with hot attached smaller lower forms that are open or closed. The Alchemists believed that they could distill gold from a certain combination of common elements through heat and evaporation and condensation. They talked about the spirit in the flask. Therefore the alembics or distilling containers had unique and anthropomorphic shapes such as the pelican or two forms twisting. I responded to the idea of the container holding the spirit or breath and creating these spirit forms that in some cases appear to be male and others female. They are made by two forms joined together in the hot process, melting the connection to the point of disappearing as the form is blown and swung. The final result is a new form that is just held in a metal stand that mimics the scientific holders for the alembics but on a human scale and attenpting to create a form that is in a moment of transmutation - giving way. The form appears to be breathing, and fluid.
After creating the installation, I continued to make singular pieces that are attached to the wall following the concept for Vapors.
This text inspired the creation of the installation Vapors:
Excerpt from Foucault’s Pendulum
by Umberto Eco
The Breaking of the Vessels. Diotallevi was to talk to us often about the late cabalism of Isaac Luria, in which the orderly articulation of the Sefirot was lost. Creation, Luria held, was a process of divine inhalation and exhalation, like anxious breathing or the action of the bellows.
"God’s asthma," Belbo glossed
"You try creating from nothing. It’s something you do once in your life. God blows the world as you would blow a glass bubble, and to do that He takes a deep breath, holds it, and emits the long luminous hiss of the ten Sefirot."
"A hiss of light?"
"God hissed, and there was light."
"Multimedia."
"But the lights of the Sefirot must be gathered in vessels that can contain their splendor without shattering. The vessels destined to receive Keter, Hokhmah, and Binah withstood their magnificence, but the lower Sefirot, from Hesed to Yesod, light was exhaled too strongly in a single burst, and the vessels broke. Fragments of light spilled into the universe, and gross matter was thus born."...........
Double Top comes right out of drawings by Paul Klee from Pedagogical Sketches. He deconstructed a spinning toy. I recreated the forms he drew in 3 dimensions capturing them in a 6’ metal form that would have spun along a taut string.