… a clean break

The last time John Kiley blew glass was for the collaboration of vessels he did with his long-time friend and colleague Dante Marioni. In this limited series of pieces, Marioni’s intricate patterns are used as the dividing membranes between two blown, cut, and polished Kiley forms. It was a genuinely synergistic collaboration of two friends who came together in the hotshop with distinct aesthetics and approaches to create singular and exceptional objects. This body of collaborative work was exhibited at Schantz Galleries last summer. When the pandemic hit a year ago, the hotshops shuttered; even though some local studios have partially opened in recent months, none can yet allow the at least 6 people it takes for Kiley to blow new work.

In some ways, the pandemic-induced closures came at an opportune moment for Kiley as he had already been using different approaches to glass outside of blowing. Ideas and techniques that had been percolating on the backburner suddenly became his only way of working. It was a clean break that gave him the freedom to look at things differently.

Kiley began making the series of works he calls Fractographs (a term he made up as it relates to the study of fractures) in 2016, but this past year they have really become a focus. They begin with large, polished blocks of colored optic glass, about 2 ½ to 3 inches thick—pristine in their transparency, purity, and hardness. A few years back, when Kiley first started working with the glass, it was with the intention of doing something architectural with 8 of the blocks. But looking at them, he felt compelled to break them, to witness the shattering of their perfect (and not inexpensive) forms, and then to mindfully piece them back together.

With the single thrust of his sledgehammer, the optic glass splinters in shards, indelibly capturing the energy and force of the artist’s motion at impact. Kiley has described the moment:

“With a single swing of a 10-pound sledge, hardened steel meets crystal plane to spill luminescence at 10,000 mph, the speed at which cracks propagate through glass.”

Like Jackson Pollock, who captured his motion and emotion through the intuitive spilling of paint on canvas, Kiley here records his movements and his mood in three dimensions. No two fractures are ever the same; in a recent interview with Urban Glass, Kiley explains that “even in a laboratory environment, using the same implement, the same size piece of glass, you would never replicate the same fracture pattern. Each one is as individual and unique as a fingerprint.”

Kiley meticulously and thoughtfully rebuilds the glass, strategically leaving pieces out to document the moment of impact and to metaphorically remind us of the common thread of the unsaid. It is a technically difficult process quite different from blowing glass, and that is a challenge that Kiley embraces. The single-colored pieces of glass take on a range of tones, darkening in the fissures where segments are bonded against each other and lightening to near transparency at the edges of the breaks. Light passes exquisitely through the cleaved blocks and casts sinewy shadows on the walls. Complexity and simplicity are in counterpoise, and the final product is one of stunning visual beauty and incredible restraint.

During the pandemic, Kiley has focused his creative energy outside the studio as well, overseeing with his wife the purchase and renovation of a new home in Seattle, with spectacular views of Puget Sound and the Olympic range. Kiley never displayed his artwork in the 800 square foot home they are leaving behind, but in this new place he is creating a wall installation in which framed niches will contain colored glass blocks (the same type he uses for the Fractographs), placed at angles to cast shadows when the western sun comes in. They will be similar in feel to his free-standing Minimalist Stacks, inspired by the California Light and Space Movement from the 1960s, which focused on perceptual phenomena such as light, volume, and scale. Kiley has always been interested in architecture—how people interact with and reconcile themselves to their surroundings. He likes thinking on architecture’s larger scale, and as an artist feels like he can similarly provide opportunities to disrupt people’s experiences and allow them space to rethink their viewpoints.

 In the last year, Kiley has also done a lot of cooking (he apprenticed in a kitchen many years ago) and taken a lot of unintentionally long walks. His forced break from the hotshop has given him a renewed excitement for that work, and he hopes to get back there as soon as May. He has two new collaborations with Marioni in the works and some blanks blown as far back as 2014 just waiting to be cut. He is also working on a new generation of fabricated Fractographs, the process for which will take about 6 months each. For these, he will draw abstract fracture patterns on the glass block, use a diamond saw to cut them, then ground, polish, and reconstruct them. His other goal as the world begins to reopen—clean his studio. His usually neat space, straightened up on a regular basis as visitors come for tours, is a bit of a wreck. Lucky are the folks who will get the chance to visit this studio in the future and get a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the stunning and unique new work of John Kiley.

Glimpses inside Kiley’s studio, with pieces in various states of completion.

Available Work by John Kiley