colin rennie

Jerwood Applied Arts Prize glass, 2003

These works draw inspiration from anthropological studies into rite and ritual as a mode of collecting, modulating, mediating and protecting unseen or hidden worlds. They suggest artefacts, or archetypes, of ancient cultures but are intended to evoke questions that such a primitive belief system is not so different from our western empiricism. The work attempts to question the paradigm of reductionism; perhaps science can be seen as our belief system and there may be transactions in energies that science cannot yet explain. Mediator, is a large assembled work in two parts of coloured and clear glass. Two funnels appear to collect inputs that intertwine but never touch, as if in the process of finding a union or balance. The contents of Introvert is a network of amber coloured bubbles, reminiscent of honey comb, a natural store of energy, the clear form spreads around the outer form as if protecting its contents. Seeker appears to search for and perhaps re-transmit an energy from the environment. The works were shown together as a series of curated/invented, relics, their function only suggested in English words as titles. Implicit in the work is a comment on how as culturally significant ethnographic objects when appropriated to other cultures “National” collections are often misrepresented, as McEvilley states- “‘Primitivism’ Lays bare the way our cultural institutions relate to foreign cultures, revealing it as an ethnocentric subjectivity inflated to coopt such cultures and their objects into itself” (McEvilley 1984, Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Cheif)