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Anne Vibeke Mou

a story of its own telling

2018

a story of its own telling is a Forest Glass sculpture consisting of beakers and an engraved rondel.



Working with paleobotanists, material scientists and glass blowers at Corning Museum of Glass, Anne Vibeke has made an installation in which each element carries within it the essence and ingredients of site and context; 385 million year old fossils from the Gilboa Fossil Forest in the Catskills and potash she extracted from local trees (the ‘black salts’ once produced by early settlers) combine to become transmogrifying elements in a contemporary glass batch. By utilising processes of late medieval Waldglas fresh readings of histories, objects and ancient landscapes emerge. The rondel engraving acts as a cartographic score for the arrangement of the beakers. Each vessel, unique in shape and size, placed to mark the position of trees as they stood in the earliest forest.


Fossil stump. Riverside Quarry, Gilboa, 1920s Eospermatopteris Wattieza, Paleobotany research collection at the New York State Museum, Albany Lye from the ashes of hardwood trees, a stage in the process of making potash from the forest in Upstate New York Reducing the lye Black Salts, potash extracted from hardwood trees in Upstate New York



The project was supported by an artist residency in The Studio at Corning Museum of Glass. Thanks to paleobotanists Dr William Stein of Binghamton University and New York State Museum and Dr Christopher Berry at Cardiff University, Ross A Delano and Martin Janecky.