Martha Glowacki’s Natural History, Observations and Reflections Martha Glowacki’s Natural History | Page 15

Figure 9. Martha Glowacki (American b. 1950), Lacuna (mirror box illusion) (detail), 2016, cast iron, bronze, wood, mirrors,
marbleized paper, animal bones, pigments, 42 x 24 x 24 in. Photo Mike Rebholz.
with the bones of birds, emerging shoots, and castings of
bees (Figure 9). This landscape recalls something of the
exterior of Hieronymous Bosch’s triptych, The Garden of
Earthly Delights. At first glimpse, with its grayish mono-
chrome, our planet may appear to be barren, but in fact
what we are seeing is the world coming into being, or, in
the case of Glowacki’s installation, a wintry sheen with
color creeping in, hints of spring’s eventual green.
The terrain that Glowacki has created in her Lacuna
multiplies outward by way of mirroring walls. The
expansion would be terrifying were it not that the
delicate design of ornithology—the vertebral structure
and rib cage are almost lacelike, even where the bones
are broken off—draw the eye back to the small skele-
tons on the mound. One feels grateful to be permitted
this view of the frail nature of things that death yields.
Standing above the box, the viewer has the sense that
she is peering into something private and precious, yet
whose boundaries are uncontained. Thus the seemingly
bottomless hole at the center of this piece—it has the
concavity of a volcano post-eruption, a dark abyss—
might read not as devastating but as generous. The void
acknowledges the unknowability to the artist of where
her viewer’s minds may go.
Making available for display the acknowledgment of
the privacy of another—this seems to me to be half
of Glowacki’s art. It is the half that stores in drawers
gathered bones, honeycombs, and desiccated corpses
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