Celestial/ Terrestrial: an Interview with Mark Zirpel
by Eva Lake/ December 2004
OK, Bullseye -- you think glass and you think, well, you know there were some people that were shocked by your exhibition. They were surprised that it was made by glass or about glass at all. Is that typical? Are people surprised by your work?
Yeah, I think sometimes because I’m new to glass and my background is in other media, drawing and printmaking mostly, and quite a bit of sculpture the last ten years or so. I don’t have any training in glass, so I can approach it without that inhibition or encumbrance.
That probably has made a huge difference. So all that drawing experience, you’re just looking at it in a completely different way.
Yeah, both materially and conceptually. If you come from a two- D area, ideas are important, in addition to technique. And oftentimes in glass, that gets left out. You know, that content or the meaning of the piece -- and the focus is on material and manipulation of the material, function and color and, kind of, more formal elements. And so I’m interested in those concerns insofar as they help me address an idea. So I think that’s new, but that’s less often the case in glass.
I had several people tell me about your show. To confess, I’ve spent very little time in that gallery. The people who were telling me about your exhibition came from really a wide range – young people, old people, people that I now could see, yes, of course they’d like your art because they’re making art that’s somehow a conversation with nature or about nature. But there are some people who were telling me about your exhibition that don’t necessarily care about those things at all – they were just blown away with the installation. What are people seeing when they first go in there?
Well, my experience when walking in that room at first is just the space. It’s an incredible, beautiful gallery space. It’s upstairs, there’s no natural light, all of the windows have been covered over, beautiful beams, it’s just an industrial feeling, brick walls, big beams and several small rooms with a nice lighting system so you can completely control the level of illumination. It’s big, it’s maybe some 80-some feet long, maybe 40 feet wide, so you can fit quite a bit of work into it and still have it be fairly spacious, not crowded. The individual rooms allowed me to set up small environments where I would put two or three pieces that work well with one another. It’s spot lit, the lights are turned way down so there’s kind of a mysterious, twilight quality to it, maybe.
It’s like museums that show artifacts, ancient artifacts, in a sense. It felt to me a little bit like when you’re in the Met and there’re those geometric pots from Greece. It’s very subdued and it almost looks like the pot is the light source. Your work kind of functions the same way.
Wow, thanks.
Yeah, there are quite a few pieces actually that look like the light source. But there weren’t just typical wall hangings, things on a wall. What all is there?
Well, there were pieces on the wall, there was a pedestal piece, there was a suspended piece using moving, siphoning water and pumping air and blowing bagpipe reeds. There’s dripping water, there’s salt, there’s some imagery created off of the beach, the ripples in the sand when the tide goes out (I took castings of those). I think the light works for me in the sense that most all the work, or all the work, refers to time in some way, and the way that I use light at real strong angles and stuff suggested a certain time of day – a sunrise, a sunset and it’s almost as if in a half-hour, the room’s going to be completely dark or completely illuminated. So I’m really interested in that sort of time reference. And I originally got into this, making this work as a sort of an investigation of alternative ways to consider time, other than a wristwatch.
Is that kind of a lifelong thing with you or has this just been growing?
I think more and more so, I’m aware of time. As the clock ticks, you realize that.
The older you get you realize that time is a subject matter for you and in some way, an interest for you.
Yes, I could no longer fail to acknowledge that we’re living in a continuous state of urgency, it seems to me. And I think that’s largely time-related, and so I thought it would be a good idea to link time to some kind of more natural occurrence, like tides, or the harvest moon, or seasons, or something other than “what time is it?” and am I late. And one other move that pushed me along was my friend Bob Campbell. Suddenly one day in passing he said, “Mark, the perception of time is cultural.”
I was going to ask you if you had a moment, some epiphany where you realized you had to address it. Sometimes it is like that, you know, this thing just hits you one day and you realize this is it.
You realize you’re going crazy and you need to do something about it.
So your friend said, “Time is cultural,” --- what exactly is…
The perception of time is cultural.
All right, you’re taking it out of context, aren’t you?
Yes I am, but it made me think about how we perceive time is bestowed upon us by our culture. If you go to Krakatoa or the South Pacific, Mexico or somewhere…Canada, even, or Mount Hood, you’re in a whole different sort of time awareness. And I think things are getting out of control.
Well, you could be right about that, because we do always seem to feel late, don’t we.
We try to do too much and so…I mean, that’s one way that I think about my work is that it’s really about time, but it’s also about nature and some kind of a sense of wonder and looking around the world – I mean it’s just incredible the way things work. And provide a whole aesthetic – there’s a lot of beautiful stuff to look at and figure out how to use. There’s imagery that carries up these ideas that we’re speaking of.
Did the whole moon and tides, that whole measurement of time -- did that come before glass or your idea that you were going to use glass? How is it that you came up with that idea first and then think, “Yes I could use this medium to express this.”
I had no experience with glass until 1994, when I’d moved down from Alaska to Seattle and I went to work in the Print Studio at Pilchuck Glass School. And I was working away two-dimensionally and I knew nothing about glass and I saw people moving it around and making things and I thought, “Well, this looks pretty interesting.” And I was interested in making some clocks at that time – Chinese water clocks. Actually, before the modern timekeeping devices were made, the Chinese kept time by dripping water. And they would measure one vessel and they’d fill it up, so I thought I would make some of these water clocks.
Is there something similar in this exhibition?
There is that one piece that drips and refills itself and drips and refills itself. So that was my initial introduction into glass. And I went about that where I talked with some people who could make glass for me and I said, “I’m really not that concerned with what this thing looks like, the piece of glass or the final piece, but I’m very concerned with what it does and how it functions.” I figured out how it would function first, then figured out how to make the parts that would perform that function.
That’s interesting because in a way that’s not that different from how many glass artists might start. You’re just trying to get the function out and then over time your aesthetic starts taking over -- which is what happened with you. You were able to take all your skills and all your concerns from other areas or other mediums and apply them.
My background’s in printmaking and so over a few years I came up with ways to use glass as a printmaker would use paper and put imagery on the glass using various techniques and even printing off the glass. So that’s been one of the ways that I worked with glass, using flat glass as a receiving surface for some kind of information.
Is there even one print in this exhibition?
There are two prints. There is one big embossing that’s on white paper. It’s round and refers to like a planet-type shape and there’s another relief print.
You were around all these traditional glass people -- how did they react to where you’ve been taking it.
Well, I think a wonderful thing about all of glass is that they’re so used to working together, it’s this like communal effort, there’s teams that work together and that’s refreshing. You know, if you’re a painter, you go in your room and you smell turpentine and you paint. So I think the kind of family sense of glass has really advanced my life in Seattle. Because I moved to Seattle not knowing anybody and then I worked at Pilchuck the first summer and I instantly knew like 200 people. And I’ve worked there pretty much every year for the last ten years. And so, I know a lot of smart people who make good work and there’s a whole communal effort to it.
And they obviously taught you a lot. Because much of this exhibition that you did was from what you learned going in there first as printmaker and then this whole other thing happened for you.
Yes, it’s a little bit of a…it’s a little scary sometimes when you think about --
How things turn out?
Well, the glass vortex and there’s a kind of a firewall between glass art and fine art. And you get sucked into this vortex thing, but it’s….
Well, it’s on both sides though, right? The art world, the general, traditional art world, they’ve got their thing and glass has its own too. And maybe they don’t always marry. I have to tell you, there’s a couple of people I’ve said, “You’ve got to go to this gallery,” and this one young man said, “Oh, glass, no, never, no way.” And I said, “No, you have to go to this show.” Because I know what he’s thinking and he’s on that conceptual heavy deep thoughts school. But you’ve kind of been able to take all of that and put it together.
Well, I think you can have deep thoughts in glass, or butter, or bologna; there’s spam carving. You know the material’s sort of irrelevant, so it could work with anything.
What I loved was the way you were able to make these images and then you’d have these circular images that were made from the sand, but they looked like the moon, right? So when did you come across that whole idea?
Well, that goes back with my ideas about time and Chinese water clocks and measuring time by the dripping of water. It just made me expand the scale and think about tidal action as a timekeeping device. There’s a complex relationship between the moon and tides, so hence the title of this show, Celestial/Terrestrial. I’m looking at these two different domains, the celestial sphere and the terrestrial sphere, and they’re linked some way. And how they are linked is manifested by what the tides do. So the tides leave these drawings on the beach of a particular place at a particular time and I’ve just sought to capture that moment and fuse that moment and meditate on that.
Isn’t that kind of difficult getting this hot glass over to the beach and whatever you’ve done here?
Yes, it’s kind of a pain. You’ve got to find a good beach for one at the right time and then you haul plaster and silica down to the beach and make a mold and then transport the mold back to the studio, getting it a kiln, and then put a sheet of glass on it, turn on the heat and slump it down into that mold. But there’s kind of an interesting source origin too with getting the mold off the beach like that and then you get a sheet of glass which is made from sand (beach sand) and you’re sort of reuniting these lost brothers or something. For me it seems kind of circularly in the materials as well.
It’s totally cosmic. And there’s that saying, which I wrote about, “as above, so below” -- you know, that whole idea that what’s right here is also above is totally what your work is about.
Joseph Campbell talks about it in that when people settle down long enough with agriculture and observe the heavens and stuff, they came up with this idea 8,000 years ago that it would be wise to sort of orient our behavior in a way to sort of imitate what’s going on in nature. That was kind of a premise of early religion. To coordinate in some way with the celestial sphere and the terrestrial sphere. Us, as humans. So however we can do that, I think, seems like a good thing to do.
So -- lunar drawing. Just talk about a couple of pieces here. This is not really a drawing, yes? You formed the sand and then poured the mold, or how did you make this perfect, these perfect forms here?
That piece is a powder drawing, I would call it. So, it’s a piece of glass and then I sifted powder, very thick layers of white glass powder, onto it in a circular shape. OK, then my idea was I would execute the drawing in the same way that the surface of the moon was drawn or affected, where you have this powdery dusty surface and you impact it with something and it leaves a mark, it leaves a little crater. And then you put another layer of powder over that and you impact it again, and you just pile up that method over and over, and then that goes into a kiln and it’s fired at low temperature to keep it dry and dusty looking. And so, it’s a drawing in that sense, instead of pencil I’m working with powder and manipulating the powder.
You’ve got the same kind of circular image but it’s more smooth, such as in this piece called “Eclipse,” which is the postcard image. So now, this is not…is this glass?
That’s glass. That’s some black glass and it’s slumped, there’s like a bowl shape slumped down into the glass. So I took a piece of kiln shelf material, fiberboard, cut a hole out of it, put a flat piece of glass on it and let it fall down into that circular shape. And then I airbrushed glass enamels around the edges and then I fired that on.
How do you get the lights rounded?
That’s just airbrushed glass enamels, it’s like airbrushed glass.
You’re a maestro! That’s really something. You’ve thought it all out.
That was a tricky piece. That’s been fired six times at least. Once to fuse the two pieces of glass, once to slump it, twice to fire the enamel, twice to fire-polish it. This is a sandblasted surface that’s been put back in the kiln and fire-polished to give it a matte look.
It’s a beautiful piece. And then you’ve kind of done opposite with it in “Orb,” yes? These orbs?
Similar, yeah. I started with black glass, the same as the last one, but instead of putting this airbrushed material on the outside to give it a sense of being backlit, I put a round piece of white glass on top of the black and fused that on. It was a complete surprise because this is Bullseye glass and this white glass, or tan colored glass, doesn’t look like it does before it’s fired. It changes in the firing, it strikes, and it gives this kind of misty, Jovian kind of atmosphere and quality.
It’s almost like abalone. It seemed like it was not of one color, that it had this interesting variation somehow.
Yeah, there are all these striations in it. I didn’t know it did that. I’d never used the glass before and I fired some off and I go, “Wow, well this could probably be put to use somewhere.”
And this exhibition was probably quite a bit of work to install.
Yes, it was a big installation issue. And my studio is sort of cleaned out for three months, until I take it all back. I’ve got some room to move up there. And I’ll also say that Bullseye Glass has been a very supportive company. They’ve supplied me with a lot of their product to figure out things to do with it and…
I’m curious what does that mean, because I have no idea what you mean when you say their product. Is their glass better than other people’s glass, is that what we’re talking about?
In some ways, yeah. They’re a Portland institution…and they make a lot of different colors of glass and different forms of glass in powders and sheets and stringers and so on. And it’s all compatible with each other so you can mix and match and fire it up and melt it and it doesn’t have compatibility problems. And they’re also very interested in putting their glass in the hands of artists who will figure out different ways of using it. And that’s kind of how I got involved with them. Coming a little bit outside of the glass field, they invited me down to their factory to make some things. And it’s been really nice working with them.
OK, aren’t your pieces like installation hell (that is a word I can say on the radio). I mean, aren’t they fragile as hell.
Yeah, once you melt sheet glass and try to move it around and stuff, yes it’s fragile and I’m a klutz with glass. I probably break more glass than any ten glass artists I know. Just being klutzy and not good at packing and…a lot of it’s on the wall, though, and that’s easier than…a lot of the work I’ve made in the past has lots of little things hanging and sensors and motors and everything breaks and it’s…
So you’re kind of…you’ve got this part of you that’s like a mad scientist in a way, but it’s putting together sculpture that moves and makes noises and…yes? And there are pieces like that in this exhibition and you have said to me off the mike, you said: “Well this is the direction I’m going in.” Tell us a little bit about that – maybe not about just this piece but what you want to do, what you’re after.
Well, I have one piece in the show that’s two vessels and they’re connected by a hose and one of the vessels goes up and down and the water siphons back and forth between these two vessels. And I’ve plugged a bagpipe reed into the top of one of those so that when the water sucks out, it sucks air into the bagpipe reed and it makes the reed sound. So, that’s interesting to me from just a sculptural way and this idea of the tides and the moving water to measure time, and it repeats this activity over and over and over so it’s got a cyclic quality like a clock.
But also, the notion of respiration and breathing and conversation and speaking. And these two containers transferring fluid back and forth, so they’re sharing this fluid. And there’s kind of an animation to that that’s interesting to me. So, this piece’s ability to voice interests me and I’m going to make a larger one of these, maybe with five or six or seven of these vessels, each of which will have reeds that’ll create additional harmonics and overlaps and maybe spread them out – put them fifty feet apart and it’d be this kind of call and response.
I’m quite interested in musical qualities too, so I made several pieces that make sound, this one by moving air and another one has a piano that plays itself with wind and I’m going use some percussive instruments and maybe get these things all in one space so they could interact with each other.
You were talking about the Chinese method of measuring water and time, but I was also thinking about how in Japanese gardens the water fills up and then the thing comes down in the little ponds they have and it supposedly keeps deer away and all that. That’s probably time-based, yes?
Yeah, powered by nature. I like the idea of there’s all these forces of nature out there operating as they do, and to tap into them to make us a little more aware that they’re there and you can utilize them in interesting ways.
You had some that looked like they were made out of found objects and I assumed that they were, but maybe that’s not true. There was one little piece off in one corner… it looked like it was made of old things and, actually, it went very well in the space since the space was so dark and you know that strange things have happened there.
I think you might mean the weather station, an assemblage of toilet parts and things from sailboats and water and thermometers and stuff. It’s…I think it’s called “Weather Station.” It measures seven or eight different weather phenomena like barometric pressure, and temperature, wind direction, wind speed, rainfall, earthquakes, that sort of stuff. So it is functional. As in a lot of my work, I’m concerned with the function.
You had spent some time in Alaska. Do you think that’s got something to do with what you’re doing now, at all?
I think so. It’s a good place for pagans to be. Humans feature a smaller part of the total scene there, I think, because there’s so much land and there’s a lot of room to run around. And you can’t avoid acknowledging the power of nature, you know, when winter comes on.
I'm having a show in April up in Seattle at the William Traver Gallery. It will probably be more sculptural and less glassy. I'm making a body of work that’ll look quite different from this show, I think, and it’ll be mostly stuff about the human body. I work on lots of things at once and I’ve been working kind of simultaneously on the stuff that you see at Bullseye gallery, as well as these human organs, as it started out. Where I would identify organs, for instance, the lungs or something, and I would try to fashion some kind of sculpture that would approximate what the lung does. So now you see lungs. I made some digestive systems.
Do they look like lungs, though?
You can tell, yes, that they’re lungs. And they breathe in and breathe out.
In the exhibition that’s happening right now, in the Pearl in Portland, some of these pieces are just beautiful to look at and who cares what the hell they mean. Maybe, you know, there’s a different kind of aesthetic applied here. You don’t mind that I’ve said that?
Not at all. They’re sort of on the fringe of collectible, I think. Yeah, definitely. I’ve done pieces in the past that definitely were not appropriate for public display. In fact, right here at Portland State, I had my show closed down and warning tape put up and wires cut because it was unfit for public view. I was responsible for having all of the carpet ripped out of the gallery.
OK, let’s hear about this. You know, this is the second or third show I’ve heard of that was censored here at Portland State. An artist has sat here and told me this.
I had a piece with some mercury in it and I was down here to do a slide lecture and I left for five minutes. I came back and in that five-minute period, somebody had broken a piece on the floor. I think they tried to take it off a pedestal and it flew out of their hands and it broke and it had a little thimble of mercury in it. And these guys showed up in white suits with big pumps and bagged it all up and disconnected the electrical transformers to a piece and then put yellow warning tape all over and they ripped up all the carpet. So that was a great success!
Eva Lake
“Celestial/ Terrestrial” at the Bullseye Connection Gallery
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