The incidental - new work by Victoria Scholes

I'm exploring some new work. I was walking with some friends through a muddy car park in Berkshire when I found a pair of broken glasses abandoned in the mud. The frames are bent and there is one lense missing, and I found them incredibly compelling. There is something about the forelorness of these that begs a question. What happened to their owner? Did he or she fall over, get in a fight? Get mugged? Rescue a child fallen in the neary river? But aside from the lost story of the glasses, there is something else that tunes into my work. I often use motifs and objects things that frame (or define) us in my creative practice, and I guess that glasses do this both optically and physically; they frame what we see; alter it so that we can make sense of it. The define our faces and how we look (my husband looks really odd without his glasses on). I have begun some experimentation with these glasses for some new work. I'm not sure where it will go, but I'm looking at making the glasses in glass and then altering them in some way - playing with the lense, the frames, bending and obscuring them. I'm trying clear cast glass for a solid, clear aesthtic, and the powdery, delicate look that you get with pate de verre. It is the proverbial two steps foward and one step back at the moment, but hopefully I will have something to take my exporations forward quite soon. As I was writing this, I remembered a poem by RS Thomas. As is so often the case, I thought the poem was about glasses, but it turns out it was about mirrors (another motif that often crops up in my work). However, there is obviously some kind of connection in my mind. X ray glasses spring to mind immediately - seeing through something you would not nornmally be able to; a sense of magic, of secrets revealed - something to mull over as the work progresses. The poem is 'Reflections' from the collection 'No Truce with the Furies': There is no truce/ with the furies. A mirror's temperature/ is always zero. It is ice/ in the veins. It's camera/ is an x-ray. It is a chalice// held out to you in/ silent communion, where graspingly/ you partake of a shifting/ identity never your own.

www.victoriascholes.com