Now on View: Stephanie Trenchard’s Illusory Narratives

Brit Micho, Associate Curator of Exhibitions

As we welcome the spring and new exhibitions, we draw our focus to the art of Sand Casting in Glass within our third gallery, showing Ancient Methods, Modern Visions: Sand Cast Glass. Adapted in the 20th century, glass sculptors around the world (including Bertil Vallien, Marlene Rose, and Howard Ben Tré) explore the possibilities of sand casting. Through this process, molten glass is poured into a mold made from sand to yield textured, translucent sculptures. They highlight the divide between ancient ways of making and modern artistic visions. 

Of the artists included in the exhibition, Stephanie Trenchard’s work stands out from the others with unique compositions, vibrant colors, and surreal narratives.

Trenchard’s work highlights female artists, including herself, and how their careers were affected by motherhood, relationships, and personal histories. Other narratives are driven by memories or experiences, however, the central through line aims to cement women artists as central figures rather than minimised footnotes in art history. 

She states: “I create my own visual vocabulary in storytelling.  Using these totems I tell stories about the artistic experience and the ensuing personal relationships usually based on true stories of artists from history. The subject of these narratives is usually revealed in the title of the piece, but it is not necessary that the viewer be familiar with the subject in order to understand the concept because the metaphors are universal to the human condition”.

A great example is Trenchard’s Diego On Her Mind that focuses on Frida Kahlo, both through the central figure in blue and references to her artwork. The title Diego on her Mind refers to Kahlo’s painting with the same title in which the artist is depicted with her life-long husband and painter, Diego Rivera, on her forehead. The painting was begun in the brief period that Rivera and Kahlo were divorced before remarrying a few months later. Though tumultuous, the pair’s relationship provided unlimited inspiration for Kahlo, who often painted or referenced Rivera in her work. Trenchard creates sculptures that often are stacked atop each other, similar to a totem pole. Diego On Her Mind is one of those sculptures. At the base of the sculpture, she depicts a still life of watermelons that references Kahlo’s final painting just eight days before her passing in 1954 entitled Viva la Vida, or Long Live Life.  Trenchard often pulls inspiration from Kahlo’s life in her glass work and creates wonderful art historical exercises within an illusory composition.

Speaking more on her work, she expresses: “In the spirit of folk art, the imagery that I create is intuitive and speaks of my own fascination with home, nature, sexuality, art making, and death.  My pieces are also always about the moment; all the sensual and intellectual factors that define a particular time.  I’m trying to capture the brief nature of ripeness, fertility and richness on many levels. The swiftness of life is also the beauty of it.”

Turning to Trenchard’s methods of sand casting, she successfully marries her painting skills with her glass sculptures. The first task in the process of creation is sculpting inclusions, or the smaller glass sculptures, in the center of the blocks. Using special paint that can resist high temperatures, Trenchard paints the small sculptures, achieving a high level of blending and detail. Once finished, the figures are then submerged into the middle of molten glass contained by a sand bed.

After the glass is cooled, it is then removed from the sand bed and ground down to create the perfect shapes for stacking. 

A sand casted glass sculpture is typically easy to identify. One side of the sculpture has smooth, shiny glass that is created when the molten glass was poured in and left to cool, with nothing touching the top of the glass to create a texture. The bottom and sides of the sculpture are textured because of the sand from the mold. Oftentimes, if a sculpture is left untouched after it is cleaned off, there are pieces of sand still stuck within the sculpture. Trenchard’s work does not feature any pieces of sand, however we can still see the texture on the backside of the sculpture.

Another technique employed by Trenchard involves the use of colored glass powder. This coloring technique differs from the paint she uses on her sculptural inclusions as it comes in powder form and is sprinkled onto the sand mold before the molten glass is poured on top. This is evident through the speckled texture of the color on the back of the sculpture. Not only does this provide the back of the sculpture with lively, abstract composition, but the colors shine through the front of the sculpture providing a vibrant background to the inclusions seen from the front.

Trenchard’s work has been featured in Habatat Galleries International Glass Invitational that has been hosted at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art starting in the 2010s and shown in galleries across the country and in Thailand.

To see Trenchard’s work in person, surrounded by her Sand Casting contemporaries, come explore Ancient Methods, Modern Visions: Sand Cast Glass that will end on May 18. 

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References:

http://www.scottsdalefineart.com/trenchard-stephanie.html

https://learn.ncartmuseum.org/artwork/diego-on-my-mind-self-portrait-as-tehuana/

https://www.fridakahlo.org/viva-la-vida-watermelons.jsp

https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/viva-la-vida/bAGbsL-eW4XUXg?hl=en

ttps://kittrellriffkind.com/artist-biography.php?artistId=327906&artist=Stephanie+Trenchard&type=