Day Trip to Utopia - Glass Sculptures submitted for CGS Exhibition, 'Connections' at the Scottish Gallery
The work explores the power of small and enclosed spaces to represent wider worlds and different realities.
There’s a nod to Japanese lacquer boxes, with their surfaces embedded with lives and places, and secret spaces described within. It’s all about Utopias: how they are patched together pictures of what we want and what we have; how they are possible and yet not possible – and how strange they look when taken to their bizarre conclusions.
And because I am looking at dream worlds and utopias, and because this is for a show celebrating connections to Scotland, I have redrawn an image from John Knox’s ‘Landscape with Tourists at Loch Katrine’ (the original is held at the National Gallery of Scotland).
Peopled with pieces from my collection of Czech glass figures, plastic toys and memorabilia this dream world is also occupied by a group of modern muses who share something with Raphael’s ‘Three Charities’ of classical antiquity. 
Knox’s picture describes a place that was the subject of a Walter Scott poem, ‘The Lady of the lake’- a location of exile and retreat for the heroine and her father. However, Scott’s popularity meant that the place became a major destination for tourists – who inadvertently destroyed the very tranquillity they had come to admire. A perfect example of the trickiness of Utopian Dreams.Finger crossed for the exhibition, but this work will be going forward anyway. It's got hold of me and I mean to make it live!
Victoria Scholes website
