Output details

Translations - Glass artworks about identity and ethnicity

Translations is a body of graphic glass artworks that consider identity within ethnic contexts, specifically Soviet-era architecture. Sarmiento’s methodology of subject identification through participant observation, interpretation, and fabrication was used in a project that visualises an experience of architecture in the Baltic States. Through participating in the Stiklo Sodas International Glass Art Symposium in Panevezys, Lithuania, teaching print and glass workshops at Latvian and Estonian Art Academies, and exploring tower block housing in Riga and Tallinn, Sarmiento interprets the lived experience of Soviet-era architecture as a framework to understand contemporary Baltic culture informing the basis for a creative expression in graphic glass. Using print, water-jet cut and kiln-forming, the crumbling facades are reinterpreted utilising embedded text, image and pattern adding visual ‘turbulence’ to embody the complex narratives of Baltic cultural history, and contemporary life. Using glass as a lens through which to view personal experiences within other cultures, this approach uses cartographic iconography to evoke a metaphorical mapping of experience. A 2008 solo exhibition at Bullseye Gallery (USA) was critically reviewed in PORT, Portland Art News (online). One artwork was acquired for permanent collection in the Speed Museum of Art, Louisville, USA, and was published in Important Recent Acquisitions in New Glass Review 31 (2010).

The body of work has continued to be developed for Crafts Council’s COLLECT 2009 and 2010 exhibitions at Saatchi Gallery, London. Selected works have been featured in group exhibitions Glass North East, House of Commons (2010); British Glass Biennale (2010); Façade: Through a Glass Darkly, National Glass Centre (2011); Dual Visions: Contemporary Glass and Jewellery, Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, Seattle (2011); and Invisible Cities, Bullseye Gallery Portland USA (2010).