Martha Glowacki’s Natural History, Observations and Reflections Martha Glowacki’s Natural History | Page 31

Martha Glowacki’s Natural History,
Observations and Reflections
Once more my deeper life goes on with more strength,
as if the banks through which it moves had widened out.
Rainer Maria Rilke
ne of the imperatives, if not the imperative,
for any artist is to understand their own
path to inspiration, to know how to get to
the “deeper life.” My ideas for creative work
come primarily from observation and analysis of the
natural world, both through my own experiences and
from studying the experiences of others. Sometimes
an intuition sparks an idea; at other times, reading and
research send me in a new direction. The work in this
exhibition interweaves ideas that come from this dance
between intuition and intellectual study.
Since I was a young child, one of my greatest pleasures
has been walking outdoors in parkland or rural areas.
Out of thousands of hours of walking, I vividly remem-
ber a handful of instances when a sensory impression—a
quality of the light, the sound of wind, the movement of
a flock of birds settling in the dry corn stalks in front of
me—made me realize my profound connection to the
natural world. The knowledge was like an electric cur-
rent passing through me with the me ssage that “you are
part of all that surrounds you, this is you and you are it.”
This is the closest that I have come to a mystical expe-
rience. I have chosen to interpret these experiences as
both a path to understanding my place in the world and
as a call to action as an artist. Imparting this connection
and concern for nature is my creative river, my voice.
The challenge is to turn these intuitions into a visual
narrative that expresses meaning. Using natural forms
and processes, I have gradually built a personal vocab-
ulary that symbolizes abstract ideas concerning the
transience and fragility of nature. Turning this base
layer of knowledge gained from experience into a higher
layer of conceptual understanding is a task shared by all
creative people, whether artist, historian, scientist, or
philosopher.
In turn, my own interest in observation has led me to
study the ways that other people have observed and
reflected on the world around them. I’m particularly
interested in what I term the history of natural history.
This includes the history of collecting and museums, as
well as the history of the scientific book. I am very for-
tunate to live near a world-class collection of books from
the history of science, housed in Memorial Library’s
Special Collections vaults at the University of Wisconsin–
Madison.
My first explorations in Special Collections were to do
research on the history of cabinets of curiosities and
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