Neil Roberts Chances with Glass

larger lead-light glass structure with grape motifs drawn from designs of Louis
Comfort Tiffany’s glass workshop. The glasswork forms a partly open carapace
wrapping around a well-used boxers’ punching bag that Neil had uncovered at one
of his favourite Fyshwick haunts. Neil found in Pettibon’s words a succinct corollary
to the kind of masculine energy he’d been expressing through his own material
vocabulary since the early 1980s. What both artists hit upon with their respective
funky-sweet recipes—ether, dew and sweat; Tiffany studio and boxing gym; glass,
copper, lead, leather and canvas—are elements that never quite mix together but
rather, become locked together in some potentially volatile chemical reaction. Half
Ether… was purchased by the NGA in 2002 just prior to Neil’s death.
Ramp (2001), included in this present exhibition, was Neil’s last major work using
the lead-light technique. Half Ether…, Ramp and Agnes Northrop at the Gym (2000,
collection Art Gallery of South Australia) form a trio of works combining leaded glass
and used sporting equipment: a leather speedball in the case of Agnes Northrop…, a
padded canvas vaulting horse in the case of Ramp. Ramp’s glass design is a slightly
decentred slice from the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed skylight in the Guggenheim
Museum, New York. Ramp was made for the inaugural National Sculpture Prize at
the NGA yet its wall-mounted verticality brings it into the realm of painting. In this
position, he finds a “sweet spot” 4 between the pressure of the floor inherent in the
vaulting horse and the elevation of the ceiling referenced by the glass design. Far
from looking up, out and away to the sky (or heaven), we are forced by the glass to
look intently through to the sweat stains and roughened canvas brought about by
long-departed bodies.
Physically and spatially, Ramp referees between two large series of works in Gallery
One: the large leaded-glass panels resting against one wall and the constellation of
softly rectangular glass panes attached to the opposing wall. Each series takes its
cue from photographic representations of boxers found in cheap and arcane boxing
“literature”. The titles of the four lead-light works (A Foul Pivot, Left Hand Blow for
the Head, A Swinging Left Hand and Crossguard to the Left) are taken from the classic
Science of Boxing by American middleweight champion Mike Donovan, first published
in 1893. From each illustration of an “illegal” boxing manoeuvre, Neil has traced
out the two combatants’ intersecting force fields and by so-doing has envisioned
an energy between the original subjects that the still photographs never allowed.
In these works, the so-called “negative space” between figures becomes positively
charged by lead running through glass, discharging through the floor to
the earth.
Neil Roberts, Half Ether, Half Dew mixed with Sweat, 2000,
canvas, cotton and leather object, glass, copper foil, metal,
244 x 28 x 28 cm (Photo: Neil Roberts)
NGA: 2002.25
The space between boxers is more obviously read as such in The Ring series. The
NEIL ROBERTS CHANCES WITH GLASS | 17 AUGUST TO 15 OCTOBER 2017