Natasha Harrison
Trying to hold on to everything so we don’t forget, 2020, Blown glass, thread and plants, Courtesy of the Artist.
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Transcript
My work is driven by my deep appreciation for natural forms, my love of the natural world and my fascination with glass as a medium that never ceases to amaze and delight me. I use glass to express my feelings about the fragility and intensity present within nature and our lives.
Glass is perfect to express my fascination with the forces of nature that are often invisible and hard to grasp. The temporality, invisibility and tenuousness of the medium reflects the precarious state of nature; my fascination with the decline of the bee population, the importance of pollination and the vital role of flowers in our lives. These themes have emerged as a subtext in my work and I have added natural materials such as plants, stones and flower petals as a contrast to ground the glass and bring an organic element.
The work is painstaking to make, often dangerous to handle, difficult to ship and maddening to install. Despite the impossible nature of the work I have found myself compelled to make larger and more complicated installations and to stretch the glass to thread-like webs of barely-there fragility.
This piece was created in 2020 and 2021. Like many people during the pandemic I had more time to think and stop to really look at things. Wherever I went I collected something for a memory. Each pod is filled with a natural material that I picked up along the way. From my garden in RI, the beach in California, the woods on Martha’s Vineyard and places in between. I cemented each memory through the exercise of collecting and preparing each natural item and then carefully sealing them in glass pods to be suspended in time. They hang together to represent all of those moments adding up to a time frame from my life that I can now always revisit.