‘Meander’

£275.00

Describing his body of work, Scott Benefield says:

 

‘Pathways could be a theme freighted with all sorts of larger significance but I chose to interpret it in a very simple, literal way: the tracks left behind that show the viewer, retrospectively, a path has been made. The challenge in making Meander was technical rather than conceptual. (The shape of the abstracted bird track evokes the 1960s peace sign that was first designed to protest nuclear armament as the Cold War still raged, so you can read that into it if you wish).

 

The image is formed by creating a murrine, in which is a figure is formed using glass that is then drawn into a long cane that is cut and used in cross section (as a stick of rock is made and seen). The Romans used them to make regularly patterned vessels, and they were revived in the early 20th century by the Venetians working on the island of Murano. Murrine are commonly used in paperweights (as millefiori) or as a way of adding small, detailed decoration to the body of a vessel. In this case, a separate plate and a foot were blown from black glass, and then the murrine were created and individually embedded into the plate by
fully melting them into a flat plane in a separate kiln process. The foot was then attached to the plate and the entire object was given a satin finish by sandblasting the surface and then treating it with mineral oil.’

 

Dimensions: 25cm diameter x 5 cm height; materials: handblown glass.

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Artist Bio

Scott Benefield received his MFA from Ohio State University in 1990 and operated glassblowing studios in the US until relocating to the UK in 2009. He has been a Fellow at the Creative Glass Center of America and an artist-in-residence at the Toledo Museum of
Art, the National College of Art & Design (Dublin), North Lands Creative Glass, Vrij Glas, Pittsburgh Glass Center, the Corning Museum of Glass and the Tacoma Museum of Glass. In 2011 he was given the Lifetime Membership Award from the Glass Art Society and in 2013 he was a Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust (QEST) recipient.

His work is held in several collections, including the Tacoma Museum of Glass, the National Glass Centre, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, North Lands Creative Glass and the Sir Elton John Collection. He currently work full-time as a glassblower at his studio on the north Antrim coast of Ireland.

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