Art Ew - National Gallery of Australia

new acquisition Decorative Arts and Design
Toots Zynsky Pennellata
2005 glass filet de verre
27.0 x 59.5 x 31.0 cm
National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra
64 national gallery of australia
Toots Zynsky Pennellata
The ethereal quality of Toots Zynsky’s 2005 work,
Pennellata, is characteristic of the extraordinary glass
vessels that have placed her among the leading
practitioners of contemporary studio glass. Its layered
colours are animated by reflected and refracted light,
each linear element inflecting the visual quality of the
next as the viewer’s gaze moves from its outer to its inner
surfaces. Their shaded, drawing-like quality is the result
of a complex and demanding process of construction by
which two layers of glass threads, in about sixty colours,
are assembled flat before being fused and formed into a
circular sheet of glass. This sheet is then mould-slumped
in the kiln before final manipulation into the undulating,
organic form that characterises all of Zynsky’s work.
Mary Ann (Toots) Zynsky was born in Boston,
Massachusetts, in 1951, and gained a Bachelor of Fine Arts
from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1973. After
moving to New York in 1980, she founded and developed
the second New York Experimental Glass Workshop (now
known as Urban Glass), where she developed technical
processes for the production of the fine glass threads, or
‘canes’, used as a key element in the design of her glass
works. Zynsky describes the technique of constructing
open vessel forms works entirely composed of these fused
and thermo-formed glass elements as ‘filet de verre’.
From 1983 to 1999, she worked from a studio base in
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, immersing herself in the
traditions of European glass, drawing inspiration and
technical knowledge from Venetian glass in particular.
An interest in music also took her to West Africa, where
she participated in a recording project of West Ghanaian
traditional music, an experience that exposed her to the
vibrant colours and patterns of the region’s traditional art
and design, influences that were interpreted in the complex
colour orchestrations of her later work.
Robert Bell
Senior Curator, Decorative Arts and Design