Lisabeth Sterling – Engraved Glass by James Yood

There are a lot of things with which the modern studio glass movement has recently been compared, but German Expressionist printmaking is not usually among them. But central to the work of Lisabeth Sterling are many things that first started to surface in Germany earlier in the 20th Century in the prints of artists such as Kathe Kollwitz, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Max Beckmann. She shares with these artists an assertive and specific concentration on the human head as a vehicle of very dynamic and emotional capabilities, a dense layering of such heads in crowded and variegated composition, and often a kind of compelling seriousness of tone that makes her objects into suggestive messages of things of great import. Sterling’s technique too carries parallels to printmaking-her stupendously skilled employ of a diamond-tipped drill means that her works are actually engravings, not incised into some metal plate to be inked and transferred onto paper, but driven directly into the surface of her glass in a form of volumetric sculptural engraving. Sterling covers her glass-almost always formed into a free variation of a vase shape-with a thin layer of different colored glass, and as her drill works upon/into the surface that exterior glass is removed, revealing the tone of the base glass. There can be no middle ground in this process, the surface is either removed or it is not, and this sets up interesting conjunctions of positive and negative space. Sterling’s drill, like an engraver’s burin, can give her line a sharp and spiky quality, one that is always enhanced by its physical incision into glass.

The covering of vessels with some kind of figural embellishment has been a human practice for several thousand years. What Sterling brings to this tradition is both an acknowledgment of that history-her employ of a vessel form a gesture to a heritage of functionality and a metaphoric allusion to womanhood-and a strange and highly individual carpeting of human form. From top to bottom and all around the circumference of the vessel Sterling’s heads almost seem to pile up into excess. As we move around each piece we might lose sight of some and discover new ones, in a wreathing of faces into a chain of being that is engrossing and speculative. Sometimes Sterling suggests a narrative bent to this assemblage, with her titles a generous hint, but often her employ of the head is more combinant than descriptive. The scale of individual heads can vary, and the degree of interrelation between her characters can also shift from piece to piece, and sometimes even within a piece. All in all it can become like a Family of Man sequencing, a celebration of diversity and difference, a creation of community, a commingling of the realms of the individual and the social. Each vase or wall piece is imbued with a particular mood, sometimes playful or irreverent, but often surprisingly moody and chastened, as if these staring heads are only temporarily mute and-reminiscent again of Kollwitz-purveyors of a sadness that is very deep and moving. The stuff of human relationships-man to woman, child to parent, young to old, human to animal, the individual to the group-seem to be close to Sterling’s heart, and the various small pleasures and endemic frustrations of them get played out across these surfaces. Her work resides in that most speculative and evocative zone that lies squarely between the human and the humane.

James Yood
Teacher contemporary art theory and criticism at Northwestern University
and writes regularly for Artforum, GLASS, and American Craft magazines.

Cameo Performances by Patricia Grieve

Step into Lisabeth Sterling’s studio and you are surrounded by a host of different characters: the studio walls are crowded with small drawings of single faces, each on a page torn from a pocket-sized sketch book. Sterling is an inveterate drawer of faces. At any spare moment while waiting or traveling, she is recording these distinctive visages, not sketching them from life around her but drawing them from her imagination. Occasionally this unpredictable imagination brings forth a face that surprises her with its likeness to that of a friend or acquaintance, but her drawings are not specific portraits, they are the fabrications of her subconscious.

The distinctive features of Sterling’s changing cast of characters are familiar to those who have known her work since the early 90s. Faces are exaggerated and strong with prominent noses and defined brows surrounding intense, staring eyes. The hooded lids and large irises of these almond-shaped eyes are compelling and haunting. Mouths are emphasized, yet expressions are often ambiguous. Sterling’s people seem outside of time and beyond specific race or culture. In the finished works, as opposed to the sketches, these characters appear not only alone but also grouped together. Couples, siblings, friends, families, crowds even, are presented, often in intense relationship with each other. It is the underlying psychology of these differing human interactions that is the true subject of Sterling’s work.  And yet the emotions she portrays are enigmatic and open to widely different interpretations. It is left for us, the viewers, to form our own conclusions about what is really going on.

Drawing has always been important for Sterling. Whether she is using pencil on paper, diamond engraving tool on glass or burin on copper plate, her graphic skill is constant. Until recently her work has been on glass vessels, allowing transparency to create the layering of background and foreground for her narratives. In a radical departure a new series of works begun in 2008 abandoned the vessel in favor of flat panels of opaque glass and of copper, materials used in combination and sometimes separately. The glass is engraved cameo style, with dark grey under-layers revealed by carving through the white surface glass. The result is strongly graphic yet with a soft luminosity and narrow tonal range. The copper panels are acid-etched and inked, just as they would be for printing on paper. And although Sterling runs off a few prints on paper, her main purpose for these panels is much more unusual…

Creating duplicate imagery on both the copper and glass panels, she combines them …smaller white glass panel on top of red copper… so that the imagery runs seamlessly between the two.  The white glass panel not only becomes a design and compositional element in the finished work, it also highlights a point of psychological interaction among her characters. It is as if Sterling is giving us a clue to the meaning of her artwork, focusing a spotlight on the part of the scene that might hold the key to our understanding of her enigmatic narratives.

Patricia Grieve Watkinson

Seattle, October 2011

Patricia Grieve Watkinson was executive director of Pilchuck Glass School until 2008. She previously directed the Museum of Art at Washington State University and the Fort Wayne Museum of Art in Indiana. She is an occasional essayist on the art and artists of the Pacific Northwest.