I was standing one autumn some thirty years ago, I think it was 1992, on a little mountain about 10 kilometres north of Prague in what was then known as Czechoslovakia in a village called Mala Skala (the little mountain) in Bohemia, which may be considered the equivalent of Sweden’s glass-making district of Småland as regards traditional glassmaking and glass industry. I was a student in the crafts college which taught a variety of glass techniques and where I was the first foreign student to register. I was also the first female pupil to be granted permission to attend lessons in the hot-glass workshop. Not many hundreds of metres from the little mountain were the crenulations of the palatial KAFKA hotel.
I was standing on the little mountain which I would run up and down according to my spirit. It was situated just behind the building which I lived in. Spirit - respiration. The mountain was quite steep and when I reached its peak the landscape spread itself before me, and it took a while to regain my respiration, my spirit. I ran up the mountain frequently, but I recall a specific day, I think it was in the morning, when I ran particularly fast with an unusual amount of energy, feeling winded as I reached the top, panting for air. I was filled with a sense of euphoria which almost caused me to fly, or what was it - that my spirit ran away with me as though I was being stretched up towards heaven itself, drawn up and up, yet I was still anchored in the mountain and the soles of my feet gravitated towards rocks and moss. I both saw the landscape and was part of the landscape, I stood where I stood and flew straight into heaven, and I remember thinking that everything I was feeling and embracing explained why I had kept insisting on working with glass.
Roughly 75 years prior to my mountain experience, Franz Kafka was sitting in a cellar on Alchemist’s Alley in Prague, 100 kilometres south of Mala Skala where he wrote some of his best prose. Among the texts was the Bucket Rider. This was the severe winter of 1916-1917 and the story deals with a poverty-stricken man who risks freezing to death as he has nothing left to burn in his stove. Hoping to promote sympathy and to buy a little coal on the slate, he mounts his coal bucket upon which he rides, floating all the way to the coal merchant. Despite his having ridden in such a supernatural manner his request is refused. Not a single shovel-full will the miserable coal merchant’s wife part with, and she tells her husband who remains in the cellar that the noise he can hear must have been imagined, for, as she claims, there is no one outside; no one beyond this… The story ends with the man, this no one, rising into the air on his empty coal bucket into the land of icebergs, vanishing never to recur; a miraculous disappearance into nothingness.
What suddenly makes me think of this text? What has Kafka to do with glass? Nothing at all. I am just about to remove the section above, but again the location not far from the mountain, Kafka’s Prague, the Alchemist’s Alley, and the cancelled gravitation created the link, and perhaps there is, when I think again, something pervasively crystalline about Kafka’s crystal-clear texts which, as he himself explains it, emanate from a fire within.
I believe that many people have experienced the inexplicable instant when everything seems clear. When the links are luminescent, creating meaningful patterns, when answers seem to be borne by the wind as though from a spirit, answers to questions that one did not even know one had posed. And when the brief epiphany has transitioned to normal hunger, or the usual anxiety of indecision, or the general difficulties of life, one wonders what was so clear. Nothing at all. And yet something essential has been altered.
Glass is a mystifying material – it has been noted many times. Its metaphorical qualities, its molten essence, its transparency, its earthly and heavenly properties. How was it discovered? What does it consist of? Who told me about the beach somewhere in Mesopotamia 4000 years ago where someone in the remains of a bonfire found a curious material in the sand, threads and lumps of something translucent. Perhaps a ship had sailed past with a cargo of sodium carbonate, known generally as baking soda.
It’s amusing to picture the scene. I imagine it being night-time, a storm is on its way, and the watchman on the boat is trying to keep the cargo of sacks from collapsing, but the ropes are beginning to loosen and, while the sailors run back and forth on the deck, the white powder blows and billows over the foam of the waves of the black-blue water. Where is the boat headed? To the cultic birthday celebration of Inanna? Perhaps someone is planning on making the fluffiest, most baking-powdered cake ever? Who knows? A little of the salt-white powder reaches land where people are sitting round a fire grilling fish and mussels and the powder mixes and melts together with the sand and the ashes from the mineral-rich firewood. When the fire has dwindled and everything has cooled, the lonely dawn-wanderer finds these translucent crystalline remains in the ashes and realizes that this is something to be examined further. Another 2000 years elapse before the glass pipe and glassblowing are discovered, but by winding threads of glass around a ceramic core which is then carefully extracted, the Sumerians were already able to create glass vessels, spreading geographically in those parts of the world which today, sadly enough, are the most war-torn and devastated.
Alloys and metal casting, chemical elements and precious metals, chemical processes are, and have been, hot topics in the history of mankind. Glass and gold are not the same, but the mystique surrounding the metamorphoses undeniably provoke the imagination. Ovid’s long poetic epos deals with all sorts of transformations. Kafka’s world-famous alter ego, Gregor Samsa who unrecognizably awakes one morning in the form of a giant beetle. Dante has many glass metaphors in his writings. I shall avoid the issue of alchemy; I only picture a hollow-eyed Strindberg with static hair, hearing ghosts from the other side in his verminous rookery after having experimented too freely with this clandestine practice.
Somebody has taught me that, even in its solid state, glass continues to gravitate and that with time hand blown windowpanes get thicker at the bottom, which is to say that the material houses a movement even in its solidified form. Someone enlightened me recently that this is not true. But the image remains, the myth lives on as imagination, as poetry.
In Hebrew, the word for heaven is shamaim, combining the word esh, fire, with maim, water, meaning in Talmudic tradition that the celestial world embraces those opposites, shall we say enemies, and establishes a bridge between them. I like thinking about the era when science, myth and mystery still were communicating vessels.
What is it that Ulrika Barr is showing us at her first solo exhibition at Galleri Glas in October 2024? What sort of sandy artefacts have floated ashore? Shells, rocks, industrial remains, interior organs? Connections between the organic cycle and the artificial colours and techniques unite in human exploration.
Ulrika Barr is attuned to the various transformational processes within the material. The blown glass, a miracle that can be learnt. Winding up the lightningbright material on the pipe, keeping the rotation constant to ensure that the magnetically gravitating molten mass does not fall back to earth but is smoothed so that air can be blown into the pipe - the spirit into the vessel. At the same time, a shovel full of the same lava-like molten glass down in the sandbox, she pulls up and massages the glass above the bottom of the blown cup, every object at its own risk. A play with form. An improvisation that manifests itself in a potential balance. That between controlling and letting go. In which the living element becomes apparent. Things can always collapse; wonders can always be revealed. How are we to catch our breath, our respiration, how shall we provide space for the spirit?
If art is not sufficient just being beautiful, nor content with communicating a clear message, can it appear as rehabilitating? Can it be somewhere to recover? A meditation on existence? These are questions that Ulrika Barr poses. Are we part of a larger whole, or are we merely an illusion, a game with sand? But are not then the illusion and the game and the created objects an equally real part of the whole? The dreams are not unreal but give us more and different lives. Wander among the living items and make your own links, for there is time. As long as your spirit breathes.
Sara Mannheimer
