Keep seeing anew…

The idea that time is an arbitrary measure of existence has rarely been as noticeable as it was during the pandemic, when for many of us the regular cadence by which we calibrate our days was interrupted. For glass artist Winnie Teschmacher, the intriguing phenomenon of time has always been forefront in her mind. She has written about “how time, at times, appears to fly by, or instead seems to crawl by excruciatingly slowly. The perception defines the experience.” Teschmacher thinks of the many poets who have written about time, such as James Brockway who wrote:

 Time is a feeling in the air
Time's not really there
But man, as history shows
Lives by illusion. Time comes and goes.

For Teschmacher, the pandemic brought stretches of downtime that she would ordinarily have filled with her work. She lives in a 500-year-old farmhouse in rural Holland (which she describes as “very Dutch”), whose attic is an exhibition space and whose 100-year-old barn (which she calls “the young part” of the property) she transformed into a studio over 30 years ago. Its remote location made it a safe and peaceful place to be during lockdowns and in the face of public health risks, but working was a challenge. When in the studio doing her own work, she works with optical glass which largely comes from the Czech Republic and which has recently been challenging to obtain.

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A tour through the renovated 500 year old building where Teschmacher creates her work.

Teschmacher’s journey as a glass artist began 40 years ago as a lampglass blower, after which she did studio glass blowing and traveled to Pilchuck and other studios in the States. About 34 years ago she was working behind the Communist wall in what was then Czechoslovakia with Jan Frydrych, who is an optical glass master and whom she lovingly refers to as her “Czech brother.” She learned a great deal from Frydrych, who helped her build the workshop in her barn and with whom she continues to work on her sculptures. For a time, she combined both hot and cold glass in her work, but about 15 years ago she moved exclusively to cold glass.

 Many of her sculptures take hundreds of hours to complete and require the assistance of colleagues with enough skill, knowledge, and technical expertise to execute her very precise vision. They are also heavy and take some muscle to maneuver, so Frydrych (and now his son) have been invaluable to Teschmacher. But travel between the Czech Republic and Holland has been almost entirely shut down for the past eighteen months, and except for a brief opening in the summer that allowed her to drive to the Czech Republic (a long trip she often fills with audio books), they have been unable to work together. It forced them to sit with the time, to just wait.

Teschmacher is also the founder and artistic director of De Ketelfactory, an exhibition space in Schiedam whose mission is to “focus on the artist’s entire approach rather than on individual works; on movement, encounter and especially depth rather than a static exhibition.” Though the exhibition space remains closed to visitors, Teschmacher used the quiet days early in the pandemic to conceive of a project in which 50 of the gallery’s artists were each given the task of making a 24-page “cahier,” or notebook, documenting the unique way they approached the experience of living in Spring 2020. She then collated the 50 cahiers into a beautiful volume of individual perspectives, some that were purely visual and others which contained text.

Teschmacher’s contribution to the project took her back into her three trips to Japan, the most recent of which was in autumn 2019. Through her photographs, she was transported not into her memories but into a deep and fresh look at the beauty and inspiration that she encountered there. Her affinity for Japan is physical—she has a visceral relationship to its architecture, gardens, art, and landscapes—but it is also spiritual because Japan is, as she phrased it in her cahier, “the epitome of emptiness.” There, space is made for nothingness and then time is given to fill that space with focus, meditation, and silence. In her cahier she quotes the Japanese author Musashi, who advised to: “Polish the two-fold spirit: heart and mind, and sharpen the two-fold gaze: perception and sight. When your spirit is not in the least clouded, when the clouds of bewilderment clear away, there is the true void.”

Teschmacher’s pristine and clean sculptures are reminiscent of stone sculptures by Japanese artist Isamu Noguchi, and within them is a complexity that reads as simplicity. The spheres, discs, and cones she creates seem to just appear—almost as if they were made without hands—like sacred relics for meditation. Her goal is to create something that is almost nothing but contains the energy of the universe. Therefore, everything about each work must be exact, from the color and clarity of the glass to the proportions of the form. Though envisioned on a much smaller scale, many of her sculptures have the magnitude of religious architecture and seem to vibrate with a spiritual energy source. They thrive in quiet spaces, where they have the room to breathe, where their light-filled and colored shadows have undisturbed surfaces on which to move throughout the day, and where viewers have the physical and psychic space to commune with them.

While Teschmacher listens to music while she is sawing the glass, most of her work (such as the cutting and polishing) is done in silence and is an act of meditation as she becomes one with the piece. It is an interesting career choice for a self-described “impatient” person, who is humbled and slowed by a material as challenging as glass. In fact, she began her working life as a physical fitness instructor at university before her passion for glassblowing took over. She is also an avid reader, surrounded in her home by hundreds of books that range from esoteric philosophical tomes to art books and Japanese literature (Haruki Murakami is a particular favorite). Her large farmhouse contains one room called an opkamer (it was traditionally the nicest room in the house, located above the cellar where things could be kept cold, decorated with special floor and ceiling paintings, and used as a presentation room for the farmer). Today, when she takes the time to sit quietly in there, she experiences an energy in the room that silently connects her to another dimension.

It is hard to believe that so much time has passed since the onset of the pandemic, and now as things in Holland slowly begin to open and Teschmacher begins to think about returning to the enterprises and actions that have historically given structure to her days, she is reminded again about the illusoriness of time and the importance of living in the present. As she says: “Everything changes and moves. The point is to keep seeing anew. The environment, art, ourselves. The only way to keep moving is to see anew.”

Available Work by the Artist

About the Artist

From 1982-1984,Winnie Teschmacher studied at Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam, Sculpture. In 1983, she owned a glass studio in The Hague. From 1989-1993, she was a Freelance designer Unica, Royal Leerdam glassworks. From 1989-present, she is working for glass artists in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In 199, she had a scholarship to the Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle, Washington.