Let Your Eyes Be The Invention II, 2012
Glass artist Stine Bidstrup was born in Denmark in 1982. In a relatively short time, she has created a vast body of work and become a respected glass and video artist with an international reputation. She achieved a BA in Glass and Ceramics from the School of Design in Bornholm, Denmark in 2004. An MA (Post Baccalaureate) was gained in 2006 from the Rhode Island School of Design, USA (Division of Fine Arts) and via the Danish Design School. Since 2006, Stine has enjoyed a series of artist residencies in Norway, India, Sweden, Denmark, and in New Jersey, USA. She also had a number of spells at Pilchuck, in 2004, 2006 and 2011. She is currently attached as artist-in-residence to the University of Sunderland’s Glass & Ceramics department. For the past five years, Stine has run a studio in Copenhagen, taught in the glass and ceramics department at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art and exhibited her works internationally. Her work features in public and private collections in both the USA and Denmark, including at the renowned Ebeltoft Glass Museum. She has many more shows lined up, some solo, some with emerging and established glass artists, like our own Erin Dickson and Jeffrey Sarmiento. Last year she had an artist residency to India, developing ways of fusing traditionally crafted glass bangles into chaotic shapes; and also in Norway, with S12 Studio and Gallery, reviving historical and architectural glass mythologies and fantasies in her work. Stine’s latest achievement has been inclusion in the Corning Museum of Glass’s annual international review of contemporary glass, ‘New Glass Review 34’, published this May.
“My curiosity in my work is concerned with ‘visuality’… the blind spot we all have when looking at something.” This observation is borne out in works such as ‘Sites and Sights (2005-2009)’; ‘Lenses’; ‘Black Mirror Landscapes’; ‘Double Visions’; ’Sky Voyeurs’; and ‘Let Your Eyes Be The Invention’, amongst others. Much of her work looks at patterns, refractions, dissolution of light and the optical qualities of glass. “We always have a blind spot, where the optical nerve is connected to the retina, which makes the eye blind on that very spot. In this same way, every observation assumes a blind spot that we are not even aware of, because the eye always compensates. We do not see that we do not see, and the highest degree of vision is also the highest lack of vision. All one can do in this kind of situation, is to try to move these blind spots, in an effort to catch a glimpse of what has been invisible.”
After an interesting and inspiring artist talk on 24th April, Stine followed up with a demonstration of her free-blown methods in the university’s Glass Hot Shop.
“My curiosity in my work is concerned with ‘visuality’… the blind spot we all have when looking at something.” This observation is borne out in works such as ‘Sites and Sights (2005-2009)’; ‘Lenses’; ‘Black Mirror Landscapes’; ‘Double Visions’; ’Sky Voyeurs’; and ‘Let Your Eyes Be The Invention’, amongst others. Much of her work looks at patterns, refractions, dissolution of light and the optical qualities of glass. “We always have a blind spot, where the optical nerve is connected to the retina, which makes the eye blind on that very spot. In this same way, every observation assumes a blind spot that we are not even aware of, because the eye always compensates. We do not see that we do not see, and the highest degree of vision is also the highest lack of vision. All one can do in this kind of situation, is to try to move these blind spots, in an effort to catch a glimpse of what has been invisible.”
After an interesting and inspiring artist talk on 24th April, Stine followed up with a demonstration of her free-blown methods in the university’s Glass Hot Shop.
RSS Feed
