ESSAY ON THE WORK OF STINE BIDSTRUP
BY ROBIN RICE, ART CRITIC, PHILADELPHIA.

A cluster of fist-sized unfinished spheres in Stine Bidstrup’s studio at WheatonArts gives a clue to the interests of this Winter 2007 Resident Fellow of the Creative Glass Center of America. Each is a model the structure of the eyes. At the center is a small hollow spot. It represents the blind spot everyone has at the center of the vision of each eye. Ironically, the point which provides no visual information is located where the optic nerve is joined to the retina. Bidstrup considers this anatomical reality a provocative phenomenon both literally, in terms of visual cognition, and as metonymy. Visually, we can’t see what is most central. Culturally or interpersonally, we are often similarly ignorant.

The Figure of Repetition. 2005.

Bidstrup’s interest in the human body and how it is understood is illustrated through these simple forms she blew into molds cast from her own body.The external textures, borrowed from mass-produced industrial objects, disguise the specific origins of the forms and suggest that individual humanity can be overlooked or obscured.

Much of Bidstrup’s work deliberately confuses or misleads the viewer. Perhaps by undermining our confidence in the validity of what we think we perceive,“we may become more aware and interact better,” she suggests.

Sights and Sites, 2005.

Bidstrup made a group of organic blown glass shapes that she describes as optical blobs.”When filled with water, they reflect the surrounding enviroment upside-down. In addition to the obvious element of distortion in reflection, mate rial qualities in the objects draw attention to ephemeral phenomenological experi ence: changing light, the season, the angle of view and so on.The artist placed them without fanfare or explanation into a public setting, Market House Square in Providence, RI, where she was a student. All the pieces were soon gone, apparently appropriated by passers-by. Bidstrup considered the appeal of the objects an indication of success for the stealthy site specific installation.

Bidstrup’s interest in the way cognition stubs it toes in an unfamiliar context has roots in her own experience. Born and raised in Denmark, she earned a BFA in glass and ceramics before coming to the Rhode Island School of Design in the US. Experiencing different cultures always exposes differences of points of view. At RISD, where she completed a post-baccalaureate program, her ideas about glass “got turned upside-down” as she shifted her interest from the formal qualities of glass to its more optical qualities, shapes that relate to the body, and integrating new materials with glass.
At CGCA, she explored some of these ideas through the construction of doughnut-shaped blown forms containing “worm holes” and twisting möbius surfaces.The complex forms are simultaneously more visible and more confusing because they bear precise grid-based lines. The painstaking technical process involves transferring relatively simple computer-generated graphic patterns onto the glass.These are then sand-blasted, permanently changing the glass surface and stenciled with Paradise Paints which heat fuses to glass.The effect is both scientific (or pseudo-scientific) and highly decorative, suggestive of elaborate historic Venetian latticino work. More than other work she has done, these pieces conflate an unsettling skewing of vision with a sense of morphing space and time.The abstract clarity of mathematics and chaos theory becomes oddly tactile and accessible in these new exploratory works.

Body Panorama, 2005.

The fragmentation of persona was literally enacted when Bidstrup covered a human model with multiple photographs of her body, building a kind of crystalline (or to some, Cubist) human being. She then filmed this individual walking through a city.

A three part video work Double Visions (2006) reveals the power of context and point of view in constructing our understanding. Bidstrup built a model of a section of New York City from mirrored sheets of glass fashioned into small boxes. She then filmed it in three contexts using a small automated camera which moved among the 2 inch tall buildings. Sometimes Bidstrup’s feet can be seen in the background, but the films are easily read as much larger than they are. In addition, the “infinite maze of reflections of itself” incorporates colors and shapes in the environment, giving the three films of the same objects in different contexts a distinctive character.
One was shot indoors in the artist’s studio; one on the roof of a skyscraper in the city; and one in the dessert. Bidstrup sees this trio of videos as a turning point in her work, as it suggests how “modernist cities create and control communities where many people live together. Good intentions can turn out to have the opposite effect,” she observes.The context—whatever it is—is important in shaping what it contains from living people to solidly constructed glass boxes.

Double Visions (Studio, Desert) Stills from two of the three films show fragmentary reflections of surroundings, of the camera, and other things in the environment.