Tiny Talk: Vitreous Enamel

Text from an Informal “Tiny Talk,” given on the night of Terra/Form: Cultivating a Community opening at the Art Institute by Judy Radovsky, one of Terra/Form’s contributing artists:

Hi, I’m Judy Radovsky.

My contribution to Clutch is a small piece of Vitreous Enamel.

As you know, this show marks the culmination of our class on contemporary cartography and the beginning of the month- long exhibition at/in clutch gallery.

It must be said that we all were drawn to this course for our own reasons, as the nebulous cluster of issues surrounding walking, wandering, mapping, borders, and identification touched on in our discussions have varied roles in our work.

For myself, the themes I’ve concentrated on for some time now concern materiality, tactility, the relationship between surface, form and light, and also with representations of scale.  This current body of work becomes important in speaking about the enamel, for reasons that will become clear.

I’m in the middle of a few projects that take as their starting point a series of photographs I’ve taken of thin geological sections and saturated crystal chemical solutions.

These images of microscopic space instead of confining themselves to a claustrophobic 30microns, which is an average of their thickness,

instead appear as vast alien landscapes representing the physical processes that formed them.

Another piece I’m working on looks at the structure of a hurricane,

and attempts to translate it into a much smaller physical sculptural object. This, of course, has its challenges, but at heart I’m interested in how we look at the forces around us that push and pull us, whether they appear stable and solid as the ground beneath us or as giant violent weather systems that are essentially intangible, but nevertheless are profoundly impactful and things that we study, chart, and graph. We interpret these intangibles that challenge materiality and time.

So, what then does my small Clutch piece have to do with all this?

Well, this was a small test sample of enamel that I did many years ago. It was almost beyond notice at the time and spent the last number of years in a toolbox, forgotten.

Back then, it had little to do with my practice, but was interesting nonetheless. An experiment that didn’t go anywhere. A kind of island to itself.

When I recently came across it, I was struck at how the material is now completely in line with my current mode of inquiry, with its vitreous mineral structure, and  its state change during heating from a fine granular powder, to a pocked uneven orange peel and then a smooth full fuse.  There’s an earthiness to its quality of shared permanence and impermanence, and a poetry to the capture of mineral color suspended in glass – what is sometimes called a solid liquid (amorphous solid).

But more than that, pertaining directly to the topic of charting winding paths and wandering aimlessly, this piece is a kind of personal map of thought and practice.

It’s one part of my artistic practice that connects the past and present, and I confess that now I have reacquainted myself, I want experiment again with it, and so it also bridges a future Judy’s practice -- becoming an embodiment of this cycle of material and conceptual practice.

It seemed a fitting inclusion to a show of art and mapping.