AACG - Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass

Seth Fairweather

Artist Statement:

Where to begin?

I imagine that my upbringing played no small part in the work I now create. We moved around a lot, and my parents gravitated to places off the beaten path. Deep Rocky Mountain canyons, Islands only accessible by boat in the Pacific Northwest, and down winding upstate roads in New England. We always ended up off the edge of the map and had to create our own worlds there.

These frequent relocations left me with a childhood littered with brief friendships, more similar to flashes of heat lightning than the steady glow of companionship. It never left me wanting though, because how can you miss what you never had? Growing up was a wandering journey of solitude, but never loneliness.

That foundation of solitude is the jumping off point for most of my work now. As a graduate student, I struggled to find what my work was really about. I could tell there was a unifying thread through all the wildly disparate projects I undertook, but it was more of a vague sense I had than anything clearly definable. I spent the summer between years in graduate school driving across the country from Philadelphia to San Diego and back, and then spent the rest of the summer in complete seclusion. Once September rolled around, I had it figured out.

What’s important to remember about solitude is that it isn’t loneliness. Historically, it has been a way for individuals to find a higher plane of awareness and insight. In our current world, we all exist in deafening echo chambers, having the same opinions spat back at us in a thousand different voices and ten thousand different phrasings. Solitude is disconnecting from that and finding your own point of view, your own voice.

Some of my work has pulled from the meditative quality of landscapes, and the opportunity to explore them in one’s imagination. Other pieces depict individuals finding their own unique way of looking at something, or depicting dedication to a system of individual belief. My latest body of work confronts the idea of the alien way of thinking, the unknown and unknowable. How do we, as individuals, react when confronted with something outside of our ability to define?

I’m drawn to the figure in a lot of my creative research. I was leaning towards a career in medicine before finding art, and glass in particular, and my interest in the figure as a focal point is still a strong influence. Glass fit my personality with its immediacy and need for quick decisions and the whirlwind of activity and orchestration of a team. It was an emergency room without the emergencies, where we all worked to build new languages instead of desperately fighting to keep things stable.

The question that most frequently comes up in a discussion about my work and my process is how I come up with ideas. I think that there are layers to that question. Aesthetically, a lot of my work can be traced back to the Northwest Contemporary style that made up a lot of my childhood, mixed with the grittier industrial style that characterizes a lot of Northeast cities.

Conceptually, I draw from everything. Life is the ultimate inspiration for art, and inspiration is everywhere. Music, science, stories, experiences, feelings, fear, love, hope, grief…all of them whisper and weave a greater experience. I look for the connections that are unexpected and often at odds with each other. I look for ways that things can marry their opposition and what can come from those unions.

As I’ve wandered down various paths in my creative research, I find myself periodically having existential crises. I started as a glass artist, and I still think of myself as one. More and more though, my work is being developed through the lens of foundry work, fabricated metals, mixed media, and even the use of imagery. Glass is and always will be the first material I think in, and my preferred way of working. I’ve found over the course of the development of my work though, that the idea holds more weight than the material or the process. I need to consider what the right material is to tell the story I want, to convey the emotional content I want. Sometimes a beautiful piece of polished glass has nothing to say, but a rough concrete slab can speak volumes towards a particular idea. Developing a sensitivity to the different whispers of materiality is critical to developing a voice that commands a room.

About Seth Fairweather

Seth Fairweather began working with glass in 2001 while attending Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana. He subsequently enrolled at Alfred University in New York and later earned an MFA from The Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. While he self-identifies as a glass artist, his work spans many different materials. Blowing and casting glass are always high on the list of potential materials, but fabricated steel, foundry work, concrete, and various other mixed media approaches are all frequent aspects to his work. He currently lives and works in Arizona.

Acknowledgment of Gallery:
We are grateful to Kittrell/Riffkind Art Glass, Dallas, Texas, for providing the Artist of the Month.