Theresa Batty

Art Brokerage: Theresa Batty Canadian Glass Artist: Though Batty might be called a "jack-of-all-trades, she is truly the master several and glass is one. A winter, 2003 Resident Fellow at the Creative Glass Center of America, the Canadian artist does not regard herself as primarily a "glass person." She paints with encaustic on wood, studied film and is a professional photographer. She has worked in Hollywood, and more important from the glass perspective, as a staff photographer for glass artist Dale Chihuly. Much of her training and experience as a sculptor in Sweden, Denmark, and Seattle was centered around glass, often combined in some way with photography, though not necessarily her own. Archival black and white photographs, typically found family photo-album snapshots, are embedded "like fossils" in blocks of glass or other domestic objects cast in glass, including real washboards and house shapes. The photographs float as if in water, sometimes deliberately distorted, and perhaps joined by distorted reflections of the viewer. "The advantage of not being from a glass tradition is doing things a little unexpectedly." Each "painting" was cast in a sand mold about three inches deep. Such open-faced molds present a front and a back. Reversing the usual order of color casting, Batty first pours a thin transparent layer, the front, which takes on the diffuse texture of sand. Color is added as a block with inclusions of sand-blasted wafers. These read as shapes in the final work. More color in the form of ground glass is applied heavily to the open back of the casting. The finished object changes in appearance as light and the viewer change positions, enabling Batty, "to use the frozen liquid quality of that depth." Listings wanted.