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Flora - The Botanical Experience. Glass models responding to organic forms

This body of work centres around the perception of scientific explanation. Particularly the translation of scientific ideas from abstract esoteric constructs into solid and real world models or agents of understanding. Answers to questions by way of scientific explanation are often not completely understood and so models and proto-explanations are used, these can take on iconic status. Veneration of science is a paradox which arises from the role science has of explanation; the appropriation of images and the partial understanding of concepts by lay people can be seen to be analogous to faith. Glass and its ability to modulate light, transparency and opacity are used as a metaphor for the visible and the invisible, or the grey areas between science and myth and idea and perception.

A series of five sculpted glass models were created responding to organic subjects or theoretical objects contained in vessels which optically obscured or distorted their contents. Thematically the work explored a specific interest in the science of taxonomy, and the blurred distinctions between definite categories; between species and individual, or archetype and exception.

The work was shown in a group exhibition of 11 international glass artists with Ulla Forsell, Kimike Higuchi, Angela Jarman, Finn Lynggaard, Marcoville, Debora Moore, Stacey Neff, Monika Rubaniuk, Amy Ruffert, Karli Sears. Flora – The Botanical Experience was shown at the Glas Museet Ebeltoft in Denmark (27 Mar-29 Sept 2010).

Rennie was invited to give a talk to the PUMPkin Centre Institute for Molecular Biology, Aarhus University, Denmark at the 2011 Annual General Meeting. The theme was Occularcentrism as a common ground between science and art. Subsequently the work was shown in the ‘International Glass and Clay’ exhibition at the Pepco Edison Place Gallery, Washington DC (1-23 March 2013).