Detail of Growler in front of slimeQrawl projection. Installation view: “Ooze Machines”, Phoenix Art Space x Brighton Festival, May 4-June 30, 2024. Photo : Bernard G. Mills.
Growler, 2024, hard-sculpted glass, 78 x 16 x 6.5 cm
Sneaky Feelers, 2024, hard-sculpted glass, 45.5 x 11.5 x 6 cm (left) & 29 x 14 x 6 cm (right)
Growler and Sneaky Feelers focus on the quantum qualities of glass.
Perhaps surprisingly, glass and quantum particles like the electron have uncanny similarities. They both melt and become fluid at certain temperatures. Glass melts when it is around 1500 degrees celsius and quantum particles become wave-like when they are at absolute zero (-273 degrees celsius).
Whereas both glass and quantum particles become fixed and rigid in our everyday Newtonian world.
The Growler series explores this apparent state of in-between, where the glass assumes a slimy quality, becoming a tactile, ever-changing intervention in the gallery space.
Slime is a reoccuring motif in Heaney’s practice symbolising the unstable nature of reality and the monstrous nature of self. It is is also an entangling substance between all life forms as Susanne Wedlich notes in her book The Natural History of Slime: there is no form of multicellular life that does not contain some sort of slime, muscus or viscous gel.
In combination with the surrounding projected video works, Heaney sees the clear sculptures as petri dishes for entangling images of the environment.
By working with glass sculptures, and testing the physical limitation of the medium, Heaney is proposing a new interpretation to Lewis Carroll’s iconic “Looking Through the Looking Glass” (1871). What if the fantastic world described by Carroll, where everything is upside down – even logic, instead describes the quantum world?
Left: Growler, hard-sculpted glass, 78 x 16 x 6.5 cm, 2024. Right: Sneaky Feelers, hard-sculpted glass, 45.5 x 11.5 x 6 cm (left) & 29 x 14 x 6 cm (right). Installation view: “Ooze Machines”, Phoenix Art Space x Brighton Festival, May 4-June 30, 2024. Photo credits: Bernard G. Mills.