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