GLASS | NORTHAMPTONSHIRE
Helen Slater Stokes’s practice as a maker of kiln-formed glass was established in 1999, after she achieved an MA from the Royal College of Art. Since then, she has gradually built up her workshop facilities and her profile as a glass maker, alongside a university lecturing career. In 2013 she returned to the RCA to start a part-time PhD by practice, completing it in 2020.
Conceptually Helen is interested in how we reference and perceive a given space and the changing perceptions within this. Her work addresses traditional and contemporary artistic spatial illusionary methods, analysing techniques within drawing, photography, formal sculpture, and optical art
to create what are visually perceived as virtual three-dimensional forms in the glass. These forms combine notions of visual spatial perception with current issues around encroachment, distancing, and proximity.
Titles reference a dialogue around health, social inequalities, and overcrowding, by suggesting we consider our perception of space and the space between, as we coexist. Geometric forms analyse the mathematical quantifiable nature of space, devoid of emotion, as theses virtual, almost holographic, time-based spaces animate and change, in harmony with the observer’s movement.