Past and Future:
Glass by Boucher & Huebner/Bernstein: May 2007
Paintings by Deborah Randall: June 2007
Glass by Trinh Nguyen: July 2007
Paintings by Michael Kessler: August 2007
Glass by Nancy Callan: August 2007
Paintings by Reilly Jensen: Oct 2007

September 2007

Benjamin Coombs: Nautical Still Life

Exhibition: September 7 - 29, 2007

Benjamin Coombs, Nautical Still Life, glass, 14" x 12" x 4", 2007.

Portland glass artist Benjamin Coombs will open his exhibition, Nautical Still Life, at Daniel Kany Gallery on Friday, September 7th. The exhibition features twelve glass sculptures that relate to the maritime world: lobster buoys, ship hardware and various objects of Maine’s nautical culture. A native of Bath, Maine, Coombs grew up in the shadow of the state’s premiere ship building facility and within a community steeped in maritime history.

Nautical Still Life is an exhibition of glass sculpture that examines and muses upon the tool aesthetic of Maine’s sea culture. Coombs’s lobster buoys, for example, combine some traditional glassblowing techniques with an aesthetic object well known to anyone who has visited Maine. The differently-colored segments of each buoy are the result of the incalmo technique in which multiple bubbles of glass are joined to produce a series of colored bands (the technique was not known in the United States until 1979). Moreover, the buoys showcase color not merely as a decorative feature but as a specific means of identification: lobster buoy colors are unique to each lobsterman or boat. Even color is a tool in this sense. The bulk of the other elements in the sculptures are hand-sized tools or hardware elements such as knots or oarlocks. The effect of seeing the hardware in colored glass is akin to finding maritime artifacts (or sea glass) on the beach by a casual observer: instead of being placed in the viewpoint of the sailor or lobsterman, we are that beachcomber happening upon an object wrenched from its working context. The pieces fascinate since we know each has a history and a story that will never be told. They are weathered but mute artifacts and that they have been found might hint more of catastrophe than of a collector’s taste.

Benjamin Coombs, Buoy (Yellow/Red/Black), glass, 12" x 26" x 6", 2007.

Coombs’s Still Life pieces display not only a firm grasp of the object traditions of Down East but also his well-developed sculptural sensibilities. In his works, one can feel not only respectful gestures to some of the great glass artists such as Benjamin Moore (the symmetrical buoys) or William Morris (the groupings and the ineffable quality of the artifact histories), but sculptural strategies such as illustrated by the totemic pastiche of works like Still Life with Lobster. In Coombs’s hands, color and texture are anything but arbitrary and his sculptural logic is lock-tight.

Benjamin Coombs, Still Life with Lobster, glass, 16.25", 2007.

Benjamin Coombs received his BFA in sculpture and glassblowing from Hartwick College in 1995. He worked for five years in Seattle with world-renowned glass blowers such as Dante Marioni and Benjamin Moore. He has also worked at the Pilchuck Glass School near Seattle and the Haystack Mountain School of Craft in Maine. Coombs now operates the Portland Glassblowing Studio on Munjoy Hill which he opened in 2001.

For more information and publication-quality images, please contact Daniel Kany.