CHASING THE VANISHING POINT

“I find the term ‘glass artist’ frustrating,” says sculptor Miranda Keyes. “I think the binary nature of describing my work as ‘glass art’ ties in with a real ambivalence about the material. Glass isn’t taken seriously, maybe because it's so seductive.” Keyes, who works from a beautifully-lit studio in south London, learned how to sculpt with glass on her own terms, training in bronze at university in Scotland and during a stint working at a foundry in Germany. “I loved working with bronze,” she says, “but the way you create form means you have to know what it will look like at the end. Everything is set at the beginning. What I found so exciting about working with glass is that it’s all decided in the moment.”

Keyes works with scientific glassblowing, a method that allows her to work alone in her studio, because unlike soft glass, the material isn’t in a molten state —  the furnaces don’t need to run at all times, and she doesn’t need to work with assistants to create the gestural sculptures that define her practice, which look as if they have been caught in a flourish of abandon. “It becomes a very private, quiet space,” Keyes says.

Last year, she had her first solo show, Tulips, curated by Jermaine Gallacher at the Ragged School in London, followed by an exhibition in Istanbul, and a current group show in London, þe Sellokest Swyn which marks her second appearance at the Ragged School. “There is something so special about the Ragged School. Lighting glass is a nightmare — it can be completely flattened — but the way the sculptural gypsum walls reflect light is extraordinary.” With the exhibition underway, Keyes reflects on navigating the balances of knowledge and mystery, control and serendipity, and the chance encounters that make up her approach to work and life.

Billie Muraben: Working with glass, it seems like there’s a degree to which the material decides for you. You can make decisions in the moment and make gestures that show up in the final form, but you can’t dictate what will happen exactly.

Miranda Keyes: If you have a clear idea of what you want to do, you’re kind of fucked. Whenever I come to the studio with an agenda, it doesn’t work. And if you try to impose too much will on glass, it gets tired on a molecular level and becomes harder to work with. It’s a good exercise in patience and knowing when to give up. People who work with glass tend to be obsessive because it is such a mysterious material. You can delve into it for your entire life and constantly return to making glasses. I’m never bored. I just find it so extraordinary and strange. It will probably always remain mysterious to a certain extent, which I think is the essence of love.

The nature of scientific glass means that you can work alone. Is the private nature of it, and potential for spontaneity, what drew you to this way of working?

What I love about the glass I work with is that you don’t have to plan everything before you start, which you have to do with soft glass. There is something about working alone, and not having to negotiate with other people — it becomes a very quiet, tender space where I can just concentrate on the form. In a way, it’s also a lot sexier. You don’t have to wear ear protectors or a breathing mask. I hated all that stuff. You get all clammy, and you feel far away from the work. We’ve had really hot summers here when I’ve been working in just a loincloth. You wear wraparound glasses to protect your eyes, and that’s it. You look like you’re on holiday.

The way you photograph your work is so specific. Each piece is somehow abstracted, with the scale and place hard to read. A sense of narrative comes through more in its atmosphere. Do you feel like the methods of display for your work, whether in an exhibition or in a photograph, is almost part of the work?

To me, photography is the completion of the work. I get locked in on that particular part of it: photographing the work in a very non-contextual, scaleless way, where it just becomes a formal exploration with lots of depth. Then I go back and start again. It’s an endless cycle. And I’ve always found print so interesting. I collect postcards, and print off hundreds of pictures that I reference to inform my work, which I keep in stacks. It’s all photographs I’ve taken on my phone, like cropped images of other people’s work, interiors, and objects. I sift through them and pair them up so there are moments of cohesion.

How does that process inform your work?

Dowsing myself in these stacks of images is quite calming for me. I can feel weary searching things out online, and not in a fetishistic way, but I also like that it is an analogue process. Some of these pictures I’ve had for years, and I’m always surprised by them, finding new meanings or a glaringly obvious detail that I hadn’t noticed before.

They give you what you need at different times.

Exactly. The pictures are quite fluid in that respect. I’ve got all my books here, too, and box files filled with clippings. I’m lucky to have been in this studio for a long time, so I can pull things off the shelves — they jolt me a little bit.

I feel like there’s an expectation that if you work with glass, all of your references should be glass, too. It’s rarely true.

I know. That is the whole problem of being put in a big glass basket — that’s not where I want to be. If anything, painters avoid painting shows. The way I see it, we all have our methods of processing and expressing what we want to communicate with the world. What the material is is almost arbitrary. That’s why I really balk at being called a glass artist. It’s just the method I use to do the thing that I couldn’t live without. In the end, it’s a very human thing, I think, to filter information into whatever form and for that to push you into a new place. I think you’re incredibly lucky if you’re able to harness that in your life, because it’s what makes life interesting. It’s what makes life bearable in many ways, because it’s an autonomous space that is mysterious and driven by instinct. It’s these things that we can’t pinpoint that make life worthwhile.

You can feel when someone is making work in a particular way because of a drive to express something, versus when it is a self-conscious or cynical choice. The form is somehow both meant to be, yet almost arbitrary. When do you know a piece is finished?

The moment when I look at it and it looks beyond me, and it doesn’t look “of” me. I don’t like to think about it too much, because it’s so mysterious and charged, but there is an alchemy to it. There is something else at play. It’s not a vain thing — you’re constantly trying to get in touch with this feeling, which in the end is to create works that are beyond you. That’s the exercise. When you’re doing something you love, and 10 or 12 hours pass without you realizing it — that’s an extraordinary thing to achieve. You become so engaged that things like hunger or tiredness just disappear. We spend so much time locked in cycles, so getting out of them is really liberating. That feeling is like seeking a vanishing point.

It’s what makes the process so captivating. How do you think being self-taught, and wanting to learn through the process of making, impacts your work?

I had no desire to be a person who worked with glass, going through expensive training and having to buy all these tools — I would have felt so much pressure the first time I sat down to try to make something. Feeling your way through is so important. You can’t bludgeon the best parts of life with a formula. That’s why friendship, and all forms of love, are so important, because you really understand how to feel your way through things. It’s about looking after this internal equilibrium, which will point you in the right direction. You can let go of the tyranny of trying to fix everything. The way I see it, it’s a very good way to spend time.

There’s a certain arrogance inherent in knowing exactly how something is supposed to be done. But on the flip side, there is an entirely different pressure when you veer away from that approach and focus more on your instincts and doing things your own way. You’ve said that you seek a sense of control, but you also work in ways that are very instinctive and up to chance. It’s interesting to think about how we put ourselves in that in between space, and this pull between two opposite modes.

I spend so much time organizing this space, because other than that, my life is so unstructured. It’s really good to create a framework in which you can then go to this very wild place. But for me, the idea of living in that place all the time is intolerable. It’s the archetype that we are plagued with, in terms of the great painters and the great whatever: the alcoholic writer, chain-smoking in ancient underwear. When you actually look at what their lives were like, it’s not something I’d ever want for myself. Being in the studio all the time, cutting yourself off from the pleasures and chaos of life, is born of a desire for control, which can spill out into this sense of grandiosity in relation to ‘your vision’. Your need to achieve at the cost of everything else. It is just really depressing. You’ve got to live in order to make good work.