LA BIBLIOTECA
1. La Biblioteca _ 2023 _ 1793 discarded pieces of borosilicate glass from Catalan artisan workshops _ 2 x 12 meters
2. 920 _ 2023 _ 80 slides, projector
3. 909 _ 2023 _ Analog photograms, negatoscope _ 36 x 43 x 11cm
"It may take days or years, or it may happen at any time, but if a crack is to find its way, it will." Stella Rahola Matutes makes this statement about the inevitable fate of a fracture as she climbs the stairs to her studio. She is carrying a glass tube about 75 centimeters long and twenty centimeters in diameter for her next installation.
The piece has a crack of another thirty centimeters, and this has emitted a very particular sound during the brief ascent in the metal structure of the building; it has not been the clean ‘cling’ of the glass that is held a few seconds in the air of a glass of champagne. It is a drier, shriller sound, a screech that announces the eventual certainty of the crack’s advance.
La Biblioteca _ 2023 _ 1793 discarded pieces of borosilicate glass from Catalan artisan workshops _ 2 x 12 meters
“For me, fragility is a material,” Stella notes. For years, she has been working with borosilicate as the main raw material for her installations and sculptures. Stella has established a collaborative relationship with a number of glassblowing workshops, and in her work methodology the search for material is the beginning of the creative process.
Stella periodically visits a few workshops with which she has established an almost symbiotic relationship: she obtains material for her installations - broken pieces during production, accidents, discards, failed attempts or simply the waste that is generated in any artisanal or industrial process - and they get rid of a waste for which, given its low volume of production, there is no recycling plant in Spain. Interested in the relationship of the craftsman -rather than the artist- with the material: “Glass is a very contradictory material,” she says. “In it, heat and cold come together. It is very seductive, but it cuts. It is erratic and amorphous.”
She has conceived The Library as an opportunity to show the material she works with from different perspectives, as well as her way of cataloguing and indexing it. Measuring 12.4 meters long by two meters wide -and which at the end of the installation will have a total of 1,713 pieces- the carpet of The Library occupies most of the gallery’s floor. “All the rugs are made of warp and weft. The warp is what gives it structure. The bangs left at the ends of the carpets show us that structure. The weft, on the other hand, is free. It is what gives it the design”.
The end of The Library (1) closest to the entrance of the space consists of rods, test tubes and other laboratory pieces in allusion to scientific knowledge, and the farthest is formed by the reeds, the glass rods used to work the material during the stretching and blowing, in reference to manual knowledge. The transparency of the glass makes the installation at times and, depending on how the light hits it, looks like a two-dimensional carpet, but the piece gains in volume in the central area as Stella is sewing and unsewing. The stitching and unpicking is, more than a mere step in the assembly of the installation, the final stage of creation. Stella must decide the arrangement of the pieces in morphological families, making and undoing compositions until she finds the exact weft of The Library.
920 _ 2023 _ 80 slides, projector
In this new installation, in addition, Stella incorporates photography as a new artistic medium, with two small-format pieces that offer a look at the texture of glass. On the one hand, 920 (2), a projection of eighty slides with photographs of glass pieces of The Library “that have had a shorter life, almost zero and, therefore, let you see how the raw material but also the first steps of work.
The third part of the installation, 990 (3), are two negatoscopes that show, like an X-ray projector, the structure of two very different pieces that make evident the processes of transformation of the material with which Stella works: a sphere, the most elementary form of glassblowing; and a more complex and worked piece, where the internal tensions of temperature and manipulation are manifested.
“My main tool is sculpture,” she clarifies. “And in this type of photographic work there continues to be a lot of handcraft. Photography is also very sensitive work, very chemical. Although you have factors like exposure time, focal length, or aperture, so there continues to be room for trial and error.”
@Ruben Pujol
990 _ 2023 _ Analog photograms, negatoscope _ 36 x 43 x 11cm
