Abigail Wilderspin

Abigail Wilderspin has studied, exhibited and worked as a multidisciplinary artist across London since 2015. Commissions have ranged from portraiture to church ceiling mural restoration before moving into kiln formed glass. Her focus in fine art began to hone in on painting during a diagnostic art foundation at Central Saint Martins. In 2019 she graduated from Wimbledon Collage of Art with a BA in Painting, beginning a MA in Painting in the Autumn leading to an unexpected path and ultimate refocus in discipline at the Royal College of Art.

FROM PAINTING TO GLASS - Words from the artist

There was a significant change in my painting practice during the final year of my undergraduate. I came to the RCA to continue exploring the development of a new process. I was painting into wood grain; an impression of flow in trees, by following written codes, beginning with a pattern derived from the series of colours on the surface of a bubbles thinning film until it pops. I was thinking about algorithms and feedback loops, waves of light and waves in flow, surface and illusion. Creating visualisation of the spaces between the organic and the artificial, predictability and intuition. I began to consider materiality, opening up to the possible strength in the communication of concepts though other mediums. Experimenting with transformation and translation between information, the 2D and the 3D produced a generative nature between each work but also within them individually. Everything became a kind of branching ecosystem of codes, paintings and sculptural installation specific to the space, pushing me to refine sculptural skills.

I began to expand my knowledge of glass during my 2021 leave of absence. It was its optical qualities and how it can distort and scatter light like water; a reoccurring theme throughout my development as a painter. The control of gradients such as light and shadow and the expansion and contraction in mark making mirrors the control of variables in kiln forming, both a generative process where the outcomes are not always predictable. Glass is worked both hot and cold, allowing me to physically to explore transition states and space in between solidification and flow.

A1 06.09.2021 15.40 52°01'23.8"N 4°50'49.6"W
Bullseye Cast Glass - Grey Tint
Ø28x5cm

Freezing Flow explores a threshold between order and chaos. The forms are solidifications and translations of the active geomorphology of sand along the Pembrokeshire coastline. The water drifts, sand shifts at the base of petrified turbulence in the ancient Precambrian to Silurian cliffs. The forms I collect here are a kind of freezing of the transient topologies found at these liminal spaces, where earth, air and water converge in dynamic systems, churned by the fire of the sun, alongside its relentless gravitation pull in rhythm with the moon. The water inhales and exhales, its oscillations warping light waves and undulating the particulate bed below. This is a place where the edge of the ocean finds a temporary stasis. In pouring wax, a negative semblance of the sand is captured; a structural fingerprint of flow over time as the tide recedes. In this body of work there is direct connection between sand and glass in substance and the form. Chaos moves sand in entropy. The glass techniques of casting and coldworking are mirrored in an acceleration of earths geological cycles. Sand deep under the ocean is compressed slowly until beneath the crust, here it melts and with rapid convection it swirls. Eventually it cools near the surface or is expelled and exposed to the chill air once again but different as a stone. It cascades slowing into a cold motionless flood. Through ages it stands, battered by the elements, through the heat and cold, the light and dark. A part comes loose plummeting into the valley below where it shatters. The river takes it and its tumbled it along the bed. Friction grinds it too sand. It is returned to the edge of the ocean. In glass casting temperatures in the kiln are raised and held allowing the glass to flow and fill the refractory mould. Like the striations you may see in rock the movement of glass in the works is marked by veiling, bubbles and the use of different colours together. In the production of glass, tempretures are similar to that of lava which allows all its constituent ingredients to combine like the amalgamation of igneous rock. In the cold working similar erosion, I have used water grit, friction and pressure against a flat surface to grind, smooth and polish the casts. are used to grind and smooth the glass. in the process of translating wax casts of the sand into glass involves moving between multiple materials transferring between positive and negatives and retaining the surface texture of the form. When it is glass, its translucency allows you to view both sides of this surface and yet it is hard to perceive what is between them, making it seemingly two dimensional exploring that liminal space.