Gomi and Glass

So a brand new site and the question is where do I start?
The most logical place to start is at the beginning, to explain the name Gomi and Glass and a post for the start of my artistic endeavours, my first show which in was way back in 1990.
My first experience of exhibiting was a two man show, artist and puppet maker Cliff Doliver and myself put on an exhibition called Doodle and Gomi Soup in the gallery at Oval House Theatre, London.

The name for the show came from Cliff's paintings which would evolve out of doodled sketches hence doodle and my found object collages, hence gomi. This was the first time I used the word Gomi. I first came across the it in William Gibson's book Neuromancer. Gomi is originally a Japanese word for dust or garbage, but it’s now used to describe anything that we discard or no longer value.

“Rubin, in some way that no one quite understands, is a master, a teacher, what the Japanese call a sensei. What he’s the master of, really, is garbage, kipple, refuse, the sea of cast-off goods our century floats on. Gomi no sensei. Master of junk.” From The Winter Market © 1986 William Gibson

Sometime in the late 1980's I read Neuromancer I was really excited by the near future that Gibson portrayed in his Sprawl trilogy. It had something ground breaking and subversive about it, part of me saw this was the future but didn't ever dream that it would come to pass in my lifetime but 20 years on I see that it did with startling consequences. (In fact it was another 10 years until I owned my first PC.) I was into the whole cyberpunk thing and thought the word gomi typically described the objects I picked up off the streets, these things I reused and recycled and gave them new meanings and values.

So that’s gomi, what about glass?

Since being introduced to glass as an artist material in 2006 I have been incorporating it into much of my work, indeed some is glass only. Glass has visual qualities that can distort and magnify but also look wonderful but this isn't just about glass its about light and how we see.

Video and photography have many of the same values of glass; it changes light therefore it changes what we see. This in more ways than one, what we see may no longer be the truth, the adage “The camera never lies” is now redundant as photo and video manipulation is easy, even for novices.
Glass, video and photography are all connected by light and as a visual artist this is the main medium I must deal with no matter what materials I use.

The piece (maybe somewhat naively) pictured here was my first and featured in the show Doodle and Gomi Soup, it was inspired by Neuromancer and tried to depict the gods or AI's of the infosphere/matrix that Gibson portrayed in his books.

Gallery of images from this show.