A Fine Intoxication
The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else...
Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass, 2001
The question is not what you look at, but what you see. It is only necessary to behold the least fact or phenomenon, however familiar, from a point a hair's breadth aside from our habitual path or routine, to be overcome, enchanted by its beauty and significance.
Henry David Thoreau Journal, December 11, 1855
How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? How do you keep a wave upon the sand? How do you hold a moonbeam in your hand?
Sound of Music
In our quest to understand the world beyond fact(s) and objectivity, ideas surface about the sublime and liminality with tangents into the subliminal and the subconscious. These variations on the theme of altered states or alternate realities—states we experience, not those posited in science fiction—reveal our difficulty with what cannot be comprehended, what cannot be described, what cannot be named. Studying metaphysics, perception, religion, and spirituality helps, but the great unknown is ultimately undefinable. That is the beauty of it.
To tap into that intangible beauty, Kathleen Mulcahy has turned to moody and evocative work that is open to interpretation, like cultural historian Marjorie Garber’s open-ended “figures of thinking.” Glass drops—are they tear drops or drops of water or some kind of swimming cell or organism—are strategically placed across a misty, brushed glass surface in a rhythmical cadence. The drops, stretched almost to the point of breakage, are suspended at different heights in front of a muted yet light-filled background reminiscent of the shimmering surface of the ocean waves on a cloudy day. Their positions seem to shift in space like a mirage created by the sun on waves. The nature references are both specific and allusive, refusing to be precisely delineated, like the unexpected sensations of an experience where reality is suspended. The resulting pieces evoke a meditative, contemplative reaction that recreates the experience that generated this new work.
The artist has observed the atmospheric shift that portends change and awakens the senses twice, once in a canoe on the water as a thunderstorm approached and once in a field as a tornado headed her way. Both states caused her to channel the forces of nature into works that explore movement, equilibrium and disequilibrium, and change. The earlier tornadoes and spinners were grounded in body work with vessels formed by breath, echoing the fluidity of gender definitions, while the newer series connects more directly with nature itself. All the works approach metaphysics obliquely, through the experiential with the act of looking at and comprehending art matched by that of being in nature. Now instead of exploring changing personal identifications, Mulcahy enters an in between place and moment, mining the space between, as she says, heaven and earth, here and now, sooner and later, a moment of changing a way of thinking, of recognizing the potential of maybe.
That place, that state of being, that alternate reality is notoriously difficult to define in our usual concrete terms. “In its greatness or intensity and whether physical, metaphysical, moral, aesthetic or spiritual, by the time of the Enlightenment, the sublime was generally regarded as beyond comprehension and beyond measurement,” a state or “sensation that we experience when words fail or when we find ourselves beyond the limits of reason.” (“The Art of the Sublime,” tate.org.uk) These ambiguities, or figures of thinking, resonate as well in philosophical discussions of the ultimates, or the unknowables that have occupied the minds of some of our greatest thinkers. Liminality shares this condition of being unknowable with the more concrete aspect of being at a threshold—in some dictionary definitions, notably, a sensory threshold—or in a state of in betweenness. Connected to the Tibetan concept of bardo which refers to a suspended state divorced from reality that can produce transcendental insights or hallucinogenic visions, a time between two lives of an individual. Mulcahy feels she was at such a pivotal moment and that by crossing the threshold, she was able to move into a new body of work.
These altered states have been intimately connected to the experience of both art and nature, with a notable group of works, mostly romantic painting, that aspire to reach the sublime in nature. To hint today that one is aiming for either the sublime or the liminal comes close to hubris, and many people aren’t even open to their existence, preferring to stay in their safe haven of facts and the concrete. Sometimes, however, individuals are caught unawares, their minds atypically quiet, almost to the point of doing away with the ego, and they surrender to these alternate realities.
Kathleen Mulcahy describes her work in terms aligned with these ideas and locates the genesis of many of her ideas in them. Speaking of a recent work, Alchemist’s Dream, she writes not only that her “universe is the opening of the soul,” but also that she is “seeking to invite your closer inspection with references we feel we understand: a drop, a wave. But…it draws us deeper still so that we are free to look for our own explanation of the earth and our dreams of paradise.” While her explanation is rooted more in western ideas and vocabulary, it speaks to the possibilities inherent in the eastern understanding of bardo.
This interest in both eastern and western philosophies connects her earlier work and her new sculptural series in a unified whole. The shape of the body from the spinners carried over into the vapors, and the teardrop shapes were part of very early work where she carefully placed a number of drops on a variety of surfaces, exploring the tension of movement and stasis. Her earlier reading of Carl Jung and Maria Rainer Rilke still seems pertinent now when ideas about the sublime and the liminal have surfaced in her work. She loved one of Rilke’s pieces: “The lithe swinging/of that rhythmical easy stride/which circles down/to the tiniest hub/is like a dance of energy/around a point/in which a great will/stands stunned and numb.” That great will overcome, stunned and numb, is the liberated state underlying the latest work but she was conscious of it years ago.
Glass is an extraordinarily demanding medium, sort of the extreme sport of the art world. The danger of fire, the slightest manipulations, the quick gestures require a choreography worthy of modern dance. The forces of nature—especially fire and air—yield to human control, a parallel to our attempt to subdue nature, especially with our advancing technology. That control is an illusion, but we continue on our quest to master nature. While most glass artists are happy to concentrate on technical virtuosity, Mulcahy is one of the few who rise above this juggernaut to see the potential of glass to transform the viewer’s ideas and perceptions just as the artist transform the material itself. In a sense she tames the forces of nature as she attempts to depict the hidden aspects of nature that have intrigued and haunted artists for centuries.
While not seeking the sublime, as have notables from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Frederic Church, Mulcahy, nonetheless is intrigued by ideas associated with it and the liminal, ideas she shares with her favorite artists such as Christopher Wilmarth and Pat Steir. Steir was influenced by John Cage and his way of “non-doing,” a Taoist principle that involved denying the ego in order to access another state of being. She learned to rely on chance, spontaneity, and the random as a way to silence the ego and open the space inside, finding that the mystery is embedded in the freedom of the very act of painting, as explicated by Kay Larson. (Pat Steir: Winter Paintings, 2011) Her artistic vocabulary, grounded in her paintings of waterfalls, for example, encourages an open-ended artistic expression that allows the viewer to remain in the concrete world or delve into alternate realities.
As Doris van Drathen wrote, Steir’s work relies on “the unrelenting quest for a ‘second reality,’ a world on the other side,” as she “opens up spaces that are determined not by the compositional considerations of painting but by emptiness and silence, and the kinds of events contingent to these.” (“The Spatialization of Experience” in Pat Steir: installations, 2006) Mulcahy’s work also relies on contemplation accessed through intuition, and her musical references resonate with Steir as well. Mulcahy’s rests, pauses, and silences explain the placement of the water drops as they syncopate the surface in a rhythmical pattern that operates both two and three dimensionally, opening up that second reality.
Christopher Wilmarth’s work is closer to that of Mulcahy’s, especially in his sculptural combinations of metal and glass with surfaces that suggest exterior and interior states simultaneously. Wilmarth admired ideas expressed by Stéphane Mallarmé, a symbolist poet and a critic who championed the work of artists from Manet to Matisse. The poet spoke of the quick intuition captured in matter, remarking that Manet’s work was especially pertinent because “his contours tremble, molt and evaporate into the surrounding atmosphere… [and] plunder reality from figures….to preserve their truthful aspect.” The result? As he wrote in the poem Salut: “a fine intoxication.” (“Mallarmé, Friend of Artists,” in Christopher Wilmarth: Breath, 1982)
About a century later, Mark Rothko, and his fellow abstract painters spoke in similar terms. Rothko believed his works were gateways to other world. He endeavored to communicate the tragic and the sublime through his color fields and make his viewers feel what he felt while painting. And now Kathleen Mulcahy continues the tradition.
Does art have the ability to transport viewers to that another state of being, to the threshold of the sublime, taking them back to the ecstatic state of creation? It is, perhaps, easier to experience this in nature, but a sensitive viewer can come close to the liminal by studying art. This, in the end, is what the work of Kathleen Mulcahy is: an experience or a fine intoxication.
Vicky A. Clark, PhD
Independent Curator and Critic,
Based in Pittsburgh
Natural Forces
Kean University, 2007
Kathleen Mulcahy’s glass sculptures celebrate the sensuous nature of vision. The recent work presented in this exhibition takes full advantage of the languorous properties of her medium. Though made of glass, these sculptures have no shard-like forms, no hard-edged crystals, no crisp-bordered shapes. Instead, everything is rounded, swollen, and curved, imitating the look of liquid forms in nature that are drawn out by gravity. Like many artists of her generation who have rejected the neo-conceptual games of much of the art of the last twenty-five years, Mulcahy unabashedly embraces the visual pleasure elicited through her sensual manipulation of the glass medium.When critic Dave Hickey, re-introduced the concept of beauty into the discussion of contemporary art in the early 1990s it set off a fire-storm of controversy1. Since at least the mid-1960s, with the rise of the austere style of Minimalism, progressive artists had been on a mission to prove the serious intent of their work by eschewing any formal element that might be pleasurable. This Cartesian2, puritanical approach equated beauty with being merely decorative and, in protest, spawned work that was visually humble, abject, and even openly ugly. Mulcahy has turned this logic on its head by using a medium traditionally considered entirely decorative and outside of the field of fine art--glass--and encouraging its pleasing qualities. This approach resonates with what Hickey concludes about the best contemporary art, that its appeal to beauty is a more effective conceptual tool expressly because it is so seductive (you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, after all).
These seductive qualities can be traced in the varied formats of Mulcahy’s work in this exhibition (all dating from 2006). The artist has become known for her blown glass Spinners. These large, singular forms have varied colored patterns that swirl around the pointed volumes. They look like super-sized children’s spinning tops and are drawn from Mulcahy’s childhood memories of growing up in her parents’ toy store in Orange, New Jersey. Though no longer functional and now virtuoso in execution, the Spinners demonstrate the artist’s “devotion to small things.” She has called up a common and appealing form (a child’s toy), divorced it from its original scale, material, and function, and produced a beautiful, and now conceptual, sculpture.
A similar transformation occurs in the Persuasion Series. Here, another small and familiar form, an ornate perfume bottle, has been scaled up and abstracted. The blown glass bottle shape in Languorous, for example, is now thirty-five inches tall. It is all about visual seduction and, hence, the allusion to a woman’s use of perfume in the mating dance is appropriate. The intense cobalt blue of the vessel’s body is deep and mesmerizing. The ornamental flourish on the stopper begs to be caressed and lifted. Even the work’s title is etched in fanciful script across the base making plain the promise of dreamy sensuality under the spell of the bottle’s contents, an apt metaphor for the sculpture’s effect on the viewer.
A form that has both man-made and natural associations is the inspiration for the piece, Building Bridges on the Molecular Level. It is part of the most-recent series that involves wall-mounted two-dimensional works, instead of vessels, made of flame-worked glass shapes over slumped and etched plate glass on a fabricated steel sheet. The glass is acid etched with a paintbrush allowing the surface to have a brushed look that is still semi-transparent, revealing the surface below. In a quest for perfect proportions, the artist settled on dimensions of 48 inches high by 30 inches wide for each one, giving them a substantial presence.
In Building Bridges, Mulcahy has literally fashioned a string of triangular glass elements that cross over the glass sheet below. Especially because the glass construction is ultimately affixed to a base of slightly rusted steel, the piece calls to mind the city of Pittsburgh, the artist’s home, with its many bridges crossing three rivers and the history of steel production there. Of course, the bridge also calls to mind a schematic of a molecular structure—as if the artist is picturing the underlying natural bridges that, delicate and tenuous as they may be, connect us all.
This idea of expressing connectivity through a sensuous glass bridge is restated in a similar piece from this series called Trace. Here, two strings of glass beads cut an irregular path across the surface of the etched glass plate. Beautiful reflections are cast as light passes through the beads and is mirrored in the watery surface of glass and down to the rusted metal sheet below. The result is an appealing, abstract form that has many organic associations. For the artist, the impetus for the piece was the observation several years ago of freshly-laid frog eggs strung across a pond. All of Mulcahy’s work is drawn from such similarly closely-observed small forms that fascinate, get stored in memory, and one day are called forth in the production of a work that invites the viewer to enter into a similar visual reverie.
A final piece from this series, West Branch of the Susquehanna, is also drawn from an experience of paying close attention to a natural phenomenon. The work is a tour-de-force of the artist’s technical skills. Irregular clear glass drops are hung over the vertical glass and steel surface in imitation of the experience the artist had of a summer rain on the Susquehanna River during a canoe trip. The pendulous drops are luscious to behold. The sensual experience the artist had that day on the river has been carefully abstracted and represented, allowing the viewer to bring their own associations to the piece.
Like the best art, Kathleen Mulcahy’s glass sculptures entice the viewer with shapes that captivate and allow for reflection. For the careful observer, the experience is transformative and sends one back into the world with new eyes carefully attuned to the connective forms glimpsed in small things. As the artist concludes, “the forms stand as a unique statement about nature, time, distance, memory and connections. All lead to a pondering about the world, what it is made of --people, animals, nature, things--and how we all fall into place, in a romance of living.”4
Kristina Olson
Professor of Art History
West Virginia University
1 See Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty, Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993.
2 Referring to René Descartes (1596-1650), the mathematician and thinker considered the founder of modern philosophy. His radical proposition that it is the ability for abstract thought that is the essential characteristic of man is summed up in his statement Cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore, I am.”
3 Kathleen Mulcahy, electronic interview with the author, 17 October 2006.
4 Ibid.
A Perestroika of Form
Catalog essay for Selby Gallery Exhibition
Ringling College
Sarasota, Florida
Excerpt
By Kristina Olson
..."Kathleen Mulcahy’s glass sculptures have the most sensual relationship to organic forms. They often imitate the look of liquid elements in nature drawn out by gravity. But there is nothing of nature’s seemingly random complexity in these compositions. Instead, Mulcahy simplifies the irregularity of organic shapes to create beautifully controlled blown and flame-worked arrangements. It’s as if the artist has adapted Paul Cézanne’s famous instruction to, “treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone. Her glass elements may be prompted by something observed in the world, but they have been refined to a purified geometric form carefully set in a controlled composition...
Works in this series (Natural Forces) involve flame-worked or blown shapes attached to slumped plate glass backed by a fabricated steel sheet. The plate glass is acid etched with a paintbrush giving the surface an unevenly clouded look that is still semi-transparent, revealing the metal surface behind. The artist weathers these metal panels- embracing chance effects that give the surface a lived experience- sealing in the rust and wear that develops...
...luscious to behold. One not only sees, but feels the slow drip of the glass in its once molten state, The resulting elements now call to mind water droplets or a viscous fluid pulled down by gravity."...
2009
Letter from Caroline David
Hi Kathleen,
I just wanted to let you know I went to see your show at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art today. I found it very moving, from the moment I stepped into the gallery and looked to my right and saw the glass waiting there. I was early leaving Pittsburgh and my GPS told me the museum wasn't open until 11am so I made a small detour to Jeanette on my way, knowing that it was once upon a time an important glass town. I found myself at the chain link fence of what I thought must be a ruined glass works. What brought tears to my eyes was finding at my feet chunks of gorgeous green glass, so I knew it was indeed a place where a lot of glass had been formed.
As I looked at your serene drops of glass I felt both the suspension of time and a sense of knowing how much comes before the finished piece that is so quiet and still. My youngest daughter is a professional ballet dancer, and I think many things translate from one kind of artist to another. The remarkable diligence and discipline of learning technique over a long time, and every high and low of emotions that makes you who you are...it was all there, outside of the stillness, but a part of it.
I was grateful for a quiet gallery this morning and the grey skies that resonated with the glass and became a part of it, the light being held by it and given away again.
A very nice docent noticed my tears falling in an echo of the drops and quietly handed me a tissue, and said some understanding words.
I felt like the Vapors was going to be harder piece for me to connect to, but they grew on me more and more. I loved the way they stood gathered together but with space around them, and in the end I took the offered chair and sat with them. They seemed like souls, and were comforting in way I couldn't explain.
All this is just to thank you for your work. Please know it is beautiful and moving and will stay with me both in my mind and when I am in the woods and on the rivers.
Thank you,
Caroline David