Trained as a metalsmith , Glowacki connects her metalwork to collected and modified found objects , building complex sculptures that appear related to historic machines and furniture forms .
and personal experience were to be vital tools for studying the natural and social worlds , ephemeral things had to be captured , described , rendered , and represented : the growth of a plant , the flap of a bird ’ s wing , the way an eye sees , and perhaps even the way a person experiences the world .
Martha Glowacki ( b . 1950 ) works through the problem of representing historic modes of perception in her sculptures and installations . Like scholars of the natural world dating back to antiquity , she struggles to make the process of capturing and recording natural and social — itself a false distinction — histories legible and tangible . Her art makes the idea of Anschauung — the process and history of sensing and experiencing — material . Trained as a metalsmith , Glowacki connects her metalwork to collected and modified found objects , building complex sculptures that appear related to historic machines and furniture forms . Her work , spanning more than four decades , investigates how the hard-to-capture is represented . For Glowacki , the means of scientific representation , like prints , the experimental device , and the cabinet , present narratives about ways of thinking and experiencing the world . These tools are not conduits to a deeper , static reality , but questions to be addressed and , in a way , her primary medium . Glowacki takes these intellectual forms as her inspiration to help viewers understand the epistemological possibilities of representing things that cannot be fully fixed on paper , emphasizing that all representation is inevitably interpretation .
By examining three categories of her material-grounded intuition we can explore the logic that links her work . I will consider her prints representing experiments with living things , various modes of capturing images and moving objects , and the metaphorical potential of the cabinet . In each of these cases Glowacki is engaging with ideas about how the material world is presented — and how these media both limit and create what we are able to see of the world . Glowacki is identifying and creating traces , things that survive and things that are recreated , as ways of documenting the ephemeral . The scientific illustration , the camera obscura , and the layered traces of stop-motion , and the collector ’ s cabinet or cabinet of curiosities all suggest their own sets of epistemologies or ways of organizing knowledge and offer their own potential for Anschauung . In considering these three categories I am not suggesting change over time in her oeuvre or engaging with different ways of understanding science from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries . Instead I am tracing thematic threads that run through many of her works and make her work relevant for exploring the poetic possibilities of empiricism and scientific investigation more broadly .
Scientific prints are a key source of inspiration for Glowacki , for whom they have been the point of access not only to modes of representing and explaining specimens , but also experiments and ways of sorting and displaying objects in museums . Eighteenth-century works related to the study of how plants grow are the foundation for Glowacki ’ s three-part series Growing Towards
16 Martha Glowacki ’ s Natural History , Observations and Reflections