ROCKFORD ART MUSEUM | COLLECTION | CONTEMPORARY GLASS

Bertil Vallien

Bertil's glass possesses the quality of ice. Anyone who has ever found fascination at the thought of a prehistoric man frozen inside a glacier, his features obscured by the frosted surface will know what it is like to look into Vallien's works. There is an interest in the texture of the glass and the quality of light that penetrates its surface. “Glass eats light,” Vallien has said. Sometimes polished and crystal clear and at other times course and pigmented, his glass plays and teases light, sometimes to hide what is inside in part or whole, but more often to bring a heightened reality and clarity to the figures and symbols encased in his sand cast glass.

In the 1960's, Vallien was a pioneer of the sandcast technique, which is used extensively by glass artists today. Fine grade sand is pressed into a form and hardened with a strengthening chemical. Molten glass is then poured into the mold and annealed. Vallien has produced some of the largest cast glass sculptures in the form of the abstractly figured Watchers or in the form he is best known for, boats.

Vallien takes his own approach to storytelling, often implying a journey as in his boats, ancient (or not so ancient) civilizations through artifacts and mummies, mythology as in the series done based on the three-faced god Janus of Roman lore or the blue heads, based on a story of a 13 year old school girl who slipped and hit her head on the ice, only to awaken some 32 years later, only remembering a world populated by blue men.