Catalog Introduction

Robert Glover: A Survey of Work

Melding the artistic traditions of ceramics and sculpture. Robert Glover’s works of the last three decades manifest clay’s potential as an autonomous artistic medium. Fusing the processes of craft and fine art, once regarded as mutually exclusive, his pieces play at the nexus between the two exploring clay’s substantive, structural and conceptual relationship to nature and life. While evidencing a profound interest in abstract form that reaches towards prehistory through Brancusi, these works simultaneously extend the legacy of mid-twentieth century craft innovators such as Peter Voulkos (Peter Voulkos:Clay,Space,andTime-Sculpture.org ) with whom Glover once studied.

His early sculptures of the ‘7Os are fin-like slab constructions that visually culminate in a matrix of wild and tangled tubular projections. Simultaneously lyrical and disturbing, these works carry Romantic innuendoes of nature as seemingly pure and ideal, but threatened and haunted by chaos and disorder. Such paradoxes are sublimated in Glover’s early ‘8Os site-specific installations that were configured in desert terrains. Projecting ancient and celebratory cadences, those minimalist pieces forged a path towards the menhir like sculptures that have occupied the artist in recent decades,

Echoing with the memories of Stonehenge. Celtic menhirs, and of their implicit significance as markers of human existence. Glover’s early monolithic sculptures were inspired by desert dust devils. Fabricated of unglazed earthenware, they assert a stately but reserved presence, disclosing extraordinarily intricate pumice-like surfaces that recall weatherworn coral or stone. Like so many of Glover’s works these lyrical works are infused with metaphors of nature and growth. At the same time, their stone-like hue and immobility murmur with the promises of permanence, yet bear the traces of former transient and molten existence. While made of material substance, these pieces project a ghostly, spiritual immateriality.

By contrast the sculptures of the ‘90s, establishing an unequivocal presence, endowing form with poetic color. The leitmotif of growth is reconsidered, often brought to an equivocal climax that features primary forms such as an ovoid egg or kidney bean finial. Inverting tales of progress and evolution, these sculptures emphasize the cycles of life’s repetitions, intoning the indeterminacy of existence. In Classic Gas, a crowning Greek Ionic capital form sinks into the stratums of time presented as a sculpted wedge, while technological gears meet a similar fate in Yadada. Paradox thus emerges as a central theme in these sculptures that find an intriguing counter fugue in Glover’s nonfunctional vessels.

Numerous ceramic vessels embrace and enclose an interior space that remains unseen. Projecting a sense of fullness and well-being, these spherical orbs bespeak a world of equilibrium. Such equanimity is antithetical to the sculptures where space is often caught and trapped between component parts, while form plays upon the razor edges of balance. Thus, in rarified moments, Glover’s works find profound equilibrium while in others the improbability of such ambitions remains predominant. With honesty and conviction, his works move from the physical to the metaphysical realm considering the impossible promise of weighing and balancing time, space, and narrative.

Collette Chattopadhyay