安德魯．布華頓．如是說

安琪拉．賈曼（Angela Jarman）於1993-1995年之間與柯林．雷德合作，期間她也發展了自己獨特的脫蠟鑄造玻璃表現。賈曼自己分享道：

「我的創作源於我對生物學和自然界的興趣。我從動物，植物和礦物中汲取靈感；但將我所有思想結合在一起的核心，是生物的成長、繁衍、衰變和轉變。」

《瑪瑙晶球》Amber Agate Geode/photo by Sylvain Deleu

 

賈曼自2015與2016年開始專注於豐富的色彩表現方式，運用不透明的黑色與半透明的白色玻璃，例如本次展覽作品中的「水晶」（Geode）系列，運用窯鑄與冷工的研磨與拋光，以有機的雕塑語言，以及蔬菜與礦物的形式，探討對地質的興趣。在牛津英語辭典中「Geode」的定義為：

「岩石體或結晶體，其內部中空，或有向內生長的礦物晶體。特別是指一個中空的圓形石頭，具有較大或形狀良好的水晶，通常會切成兩半以展示其內部的美麗結構，水晶內部的中空結構本身也是一個空間。」

《藍色飛船》Cobalt Lozenge Agate Geode/photo by Sylvain Deleu

她的作品既有具體的形象與立體空間維度，又有美麗光芒與不可知的神祕感，既熟悉又陌生，既具象又抽象，使人無法捉摸，只能在兩者之間找到一種曖味的平衡。如同照鏡子一般，雖然鏡子反射了你看到的所有事物，但其實鏡子裡不存在任何物質。

 

《綠晶深林》Green Tea Geode Jar/photo by Sylvain Deleu

Andrew Brewerton said……

Angela Jarman (b.1971) worked with Colin Reid from 1993–5 while developing her wholly distinctive practise in lost-wax glass casting.

All the ideas for my work originate from a lifelong interest I have in biology and the natural world. I look to all sources for inspiration – animal, vegetable and mineral; but the one common theme that unites all my thinking has at its core ideas to do with growth and reproduction, duplication, decay and transformation.[1]

Jarman's work since 2015/16 has acquired a rich chromatic interest since her earlier preoccupation with opaque black and translucent 'white' glass, and is represented in A Thread of Light by works from her recent Geode series, using kiln-cast body colour with cold-working techniques of grinding and polishing. In this work her overtly organic sculptural language, eliding vegetable and mineral forms, explores a more formal geological interest around the vessel form. The Oxford English Dictionary defines geode as:

A rock body or nodule having an internal cavity lined or filled with mineral crystals growing inwards; esp. a hollow, rounded stone containing large or well-formed crystals and typically cut in half for display. Also: the cavity within such a body; the contents of such a cavity. Also in figurative contexts.

The figurative context or dimension of these pieces places them slightly beyond reach, glowing and unknowable, balancing ambiguously qualities of strange familiarity and ultimate resistance to assimilation. Mirrors that mirror not only what you see in them, and whose embodied obscurity in the glassy medium is perhaps precisely the point.

[1] Angela Jarman's website is at: https://www.angelajarman.com/profile-statement