from the graduating glass students of Sheridan Institute of Advanced Learning and Technology

Orion Arger

Riel Brown

Marcia Christie

Steve Cote

Sarah Garrard

Melody Jewitt

Benjiman Kikkert

Arron Lowe

Cortney Lush

Sally McCubbin

Rob Peyregatt

Erica Preston-French

Sandra Scott

Advisor: Kevin Lockau

Graduating Glass Students of the Sheridan Institute of Advanced Learning and Technology

Mutual Tower Gallery

May 20th to May 22nd, 2005

We attain fulfillment only if we carry

the breath of the world

without surrender

or escape.

From Breathing Room Poems by Peter Davison

Breathing Room connotes many things. It can represent liberty ~ room to breathe. It can imply spaciousness. It can mean respite after demanding or arduous tasks. It can also mean, simply and literally, a room which breathes. And in their creative and engaging reaction to the space of the Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery’s Tower Gallery, the students from Sheridan have created a space which addresses all those references – and then some.

In both Christian and Jewish traditions, the words breathe, wind, spirit and life all play off each other as if in interwoven dance. In Hebrew and Greek, spirit(us) means breathe. In ancient Hebrew Ruah is the word for wind but can also be translated as spirit. Which is how we come to the word enthusiasm from the Greek en-theo-ism literally meaning to be filled with God, as in to be filled with spirit, the spirit of the wind as in the air we breathe, as in Spirit of Life.

And somehow this installation has captured the essence of the Spirit of Life. Each glass globule is a permanent record, an encapturing of the breath or the spirit of the young artist who created it. Some are expansive shapes – filled almost to the point of appearing ready to burst open. They are ripe with potential and energy seeming to, despite the weightiness of the materials from which they are constructed, float above, rising evermore, beginning a journey.

Others however are in the midst of deflating. The air, spirit, potential with which they were once filled is running out. In one sense, these can be seen as the progression of time, the implication of eventual and inevitable mortality.

Perhaps then we can read this installation as an, unconscious, memento mori work. From the small, denser globes which seem seed-like in their small perfection, to the progression and growth of the larger, lighter works and to the eventual deflation, the passing away of the breath, of the spirit, in the ones which are deflating – we can read in this Breathing Room the cycle of life and intimations of man’s mortality.

As created by a group of fourteen remarkable young artists the work achieves a certain poignancy. They are poised to leave school, to go out in the world and begin the next stages of their lives. The cycle has begun. They must explore the world around them with enthusiasm, always looking for opportunities to grow and room to breathe.