Obsessed by the passage of time, I focus my sculptural work on the body and the imprints I make of it. In this way, I combat the idea of our finitude, with the awareness of its undeniable reality.
Reidunn Ruglands glass art fascinates
This beautiful and almost unanswered working artist gives in her art a complementary insight into her character. With glass as a medium, she gives shape to a kind of reflection, to “something that has lasted”. With the hand of the stopper more than that of the blower or grinder, she captures images of the past, be it in a body movement, a historical motif, or in the remains of an old broken element. As a medium, glass has a myriad of expressions. The three strongest are perhaps the liquid state of solidification, the threatening sharpness of the inserts after crushing, or the color spectrum which is enhanced by the pigments that are enveloped.
In several of his motifs, it is precisely these qualities that are used by Reidunn. The pyramid is an ancient form. Egypt’s crystalline role models carry tens of thousands in them. Reidunn’s plastic pyramids seem even older. They are asymmetrical and round-edged, and envelop matte-gloss layers of reindeer lichen with colors. The cutting and grinding has not yet begun. The grave form of the Nile is somehow only in its form.
The glass inserts are located on the floor. They are remnants of broken window surfaces, of shapes that have been and that we have looked through, and from which we have received light. These polygons are recreated into scales and barrels in Reidunn’s hands. Layed on top of each other, the pieces are punched together by bottoms that receive one to be carried, and inside, above and below the glass run thin tear ducts filled with colors.
Perhaps her stepped bodies seem strongest. Torso, hips, hands and thighs are like soft fragments of movements that were. Like transparent body masks, they are both dissolved and present, like images of a moment’s short transience. With its crackled milkiness that hangs again after the plaster, it is as if what happened was a long time ago, it is old moments that are captured, perhaps all the way from Pompeii. This is how the expression is given span, – because it is young bodies loaded with life and eroticism that Reidunn has frozen to a picture of something immutable.
There is a future in Reidunn’s themes. As if through the glass, she sees both ways.
Thomas Thiis-Evensen
Professor, Dr. Philos.
