Mirror-Mondeo Bite

I recently visited the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, a repository of sculpted art, which was hosting a glass exhibition. Nothing can be made from glass without the intermediate stage of heating grains of silica to produce liquid glass, the red-hot molten lava from which all glass objects emerge. In this state, glass can be pulled, stretched, dripped and poured, and the capacity of glass to form drops, blobs and bubbles lends itself beautifully to abstraction. Petr Stanicky's stretched glass sculpture Mirror-Mondeo Bite (2014) is formed using precisely these properties of liquid glass, which is malleable enough to be pulled to a length of nearly two metres. These sculptures exist in an in-between state, having cooled to a state of solid matter while retaining the fluidity of their liquid form.

When Elizabath Gregory interviewed Stanicky about the piece, he responded:

“The object connects the ordinary with the imaginative, but at the same time, the solid with the fragile, and organic with the industrial. These are properties that are unique to glass and fascinating to me.

“I’m not sure if it’s alive, but I can pretend it is and it’s definitely liquid. It is actually referred to as a chilled liquid. It does not have a solid crystal lattice. It is fragile and strong at the same time, it is solid, but it can be bent, inflated, blown, melted, and cut like a stone. It is also similarly stable (for centuries).”

The Mondeo car window is something with which most of us are familiar. We see through our car windows which obediently rise and lower as we command. Yet the liquid ‘creature’ of the sculpture is untamed, fluid and undefined. It is also wonderfully more beautiful that the flat glass’ uniformity and regularity. It is living and moving, whereas the glass window is stationary and boring.

I believe that in heaven we shall continue to grow, develop, mature and blossom. Whereas our current bodies are completed in our twenties and go down-hill from our sixties, our eternal state will impose no limits on our growth. I refer here not to physical size and shape but spiritual beauty. Though we shall be perfect when the trumpet sounds, we shall also, I think, grow and develop within that realm of perfection. In heaven, we shall be more energetic, more lively, more dynamic and more versatile than anything we saw on earth. 

But, as it is written, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love him” 1 Corinthians 2:9 ESV