Briana McCarthy
Art Practice and Supporting Work
Art Ritual/Practice Methodology
My art practice, while remaining ritualistic, has subtly shifted from fairly structured, formulaic steps to something more free and intuitive. All the ingredients I’ve used in the past are still there — sketch notes, music, writing, and poetry — but now they don’t all apply to each work. I’ve always assembled a music playlist for each work, the playlist serving as a device to keep me on the same emotional plane as whichever piece I’m working on, however, I only curated one playlist for my recent work: The Toll, which is the only painting. As I shifted from more narrative, symbolic imagery, as seen in my painted works or Infestation, to creating symbolic objects with glass, my need for a re-entry point into the work, music and poetry being that for works with a more structured narrative, fell away: the building of the object became that device and I became an ingredient in the ritual instead of just the person performing it.
The work itself has started to come second to the making process. During the making, I am in a state of continued, intense reflection: thematic and self reflective. It is an active state of learning guided by tactile, visual, and introspective exploration. The resulting artwork is an artifact, or remnant, of the ritual, the ritual being the true creative investigation and expression.
Mourning Jewelry
Mourning Jewelry: Snake, 2024, soldered (lead) glass and chain, 20 x 4 x 2 inch
Mourning Jewelry: Hand, 2024, soldered glass and chain, 15 x 4 x 2 inch
Mourning Jewelry: Roots, 2024, soldered (lead) glass and chain, 18 x 4 x 2 inch
Mourning Dress
Laces up the back pulled tight
Bone to bone, breath is blight
Close, tight, cinch, bite
Girdled in the wretched night
Pull near, don’t fight
Bone hand, scythe bright
Mourning Dress was written early in Unit 2. It marks one of the first moments within my practice of considering mourning garments and wearable symbols of grief and remembrance. I wrote nothing specifically for these works, maybe because working with glass in memory of my Mother was enough*.
Initial sketches
I cut out cardboard fingers in varying positions in order to easily arrange and sketch the jewelry designs. The measurements were important because I wanted the glass fingers sized to my own hands, since it is my grief. I also chose to be particular about size and measurement because the fingers would be abstracted and flattened by use of glass as a material and they needed to still be recognizable as fingers. I set myself the limitation of using 1 middle finger, 2 ring fingers, and 2 pinky fingers in each design. This was in response to How Monstrous If I Healed, and using the fingers which are missing in that piece. These cardboard fingers also served as patterns for cutting the glass.
Design Choices
The snake has long been a symbol of both life and death (Ronnberg, 2010, p.196). As I considered the cycle of life and death, decay, and memory, it was an appropriate symbol.
The choice of the hand came from thoughts of protection and my mother's hands. It brings to mind the Hamsa hand, a symbol of protection often worn as jewelry.
The structure of roots harkens to family trees and the underground root systems that keep a tree stable and steady. There is also the consideration of the cycle of bodily decay, carried by the different glass choices*.
* See Critical Reflection for further discussion of glass choice
Ronnberg, A. and Martin, K. (eds.) (2010) The book of symbols reflections of archetypal images. Cologne, Germany: Taschen.
Planning the Cutting
There were multiple planning steps before any glass cutting took place. I needed to know how many of each finger pattern I would need for each design and if they were right hand or left hand fingers. Some of the glass used has a different treatment or texture on each side, so the direction of the fingers became important so as not to confuse the pendant pattern and to ensure the chosen colors and textures were present where planned. Material waste was also a concern, so efficient pattern layout for cutting became important, beyond time saving, with minimal cuts.
Glass cut and ready for copper foiling
Foiled glass ready for soldering
Display and Chain Concerns
The first iteration of these works hung by thin jewelry chains, long enough to fit over a head so the pieces could be worn. The difficulty of wearing the pieces lies with the fragility and size of the pendants, which is less harrowing when the jewelry can be taken off. Memory is not something that can easily be set aside. A person can’t escape their memories and it takes strength to carry them. The heavier chains better convey the weight of memory and grief and their individualistic nature: memories and grief are singular to a person. The thick chains also highlight the delicate nature of the pendant and start a conversation between strength and fragility.
Mourning Necklaces
Detail: Mourning Necklace Series: Grasping Flower, 2024, soldered glass and chain, 12 x 4 inch
Detail: Mourning Necklace Series: Us Two, 2024, soldered glass and chain, 14 x 2 inch
This series is part of my exploration into making Mourning Jewelry wearable. To achieve this, I used thin jewelry chains and more compact, so less fragile, pendant designs. The heavy play between strength and fragility is much less present than it is in the Mourning Jewelry pieces, but I think that is okay. These are a bit more quiet and, maybe, a bit more private.
The nature of memory was a strong influence on the glass choices but with less focus on cycles and more attention to how different memories feel: heavy and dark, light and renewing. Some pieces are made up of a variety of glasses, but I also experimented by using just iridescent glass in some, usually a lighter color paired with a darker.
The Grasping Flower pendant design. Was originally going to hang with the fingertips down, but it occurred to me that the fingers reaching for the throat better represents how grief feels: vulnerable, dangerous, and reaching inward for memories, understanding, or the missing person.
The Us Two pendant represents me and my Mother. She is the big finger and I am the smaller, at least at the moment. I imagine these roles switching between the two depending on how I feel day to day and how I am remembering her. She was the parent and carer in most of my memories, but her illness inverted that reality.
Design sketches
What's Left of You
What's Left of You, 2024, soldered glass, 170 x 4 x 1 inch
Keep You Close
Swaddled in the chains of you
Cool
Biting
Heavy
Secure
Reflecting myself
What's left of you
Held
Trapped
Your shifting links pinch and cut
I will gladly
Bruise
Bleed
Welcome the sting
The weight
To keep you close
To have you always
Bedtime in Summer
Feet washed pink
Still bare
Window a breath from the sill
Night whispering between them
The last of the day's sun
Inhaled from a golden head
A kiss for the brow and each freckled cheek
From the first lips to do so
A trailing hand over crown, shoulder
Soft steps
Softer declaration
The creak of hinges
Safety and slumber and dreams
From conception, What's Left of You was meant to explore strength and fragility. I had thoughts about placing fingerprints or poetry inside the individual links and that all the links would be built out into 3 dimensional forms.
The first sketches are architectural, clean line chain links, but I very quickly realized that carrying the finger design through to this work would make for a conceptually stronger piece.
I tested the design with 3D cardboard models, to start. I was going to try links made of two fingers, but they were too bulky to link together and looked a little like shrimp. I shifted to a 4 finger link design, which made the piece more fragile and required a lot more material. The 4 finger model was built of balsa wood, which is closer to the thickness of the glass. The balsa wood model was used to make the pattern that allowed me to cut fairly uniform glass pieces. I constructed a single glass finger as a test of the pattern.
I cut all the glass first, then copper foiled each piece, and partially assembled. I left the links in two halves so they could be arranged and linked later. Due to the extensive handling of the glass, the labelling system, and the chemical used during soldering called flux, all the links needed to be cleaned before coming together as a chain.
Links of Varying Design
Initially, I planned to construct links of uniform design, only varying in color and opacity. Fully building out the first link took over 2 hours: I would need to sacrifice length or change the plan in order to finish the work for the postgraduate exhibition. Length is important for the piece: it speaks to labour and time, and captivity. The time crunch was a kind of blessing, because the resulting links are much more interesting and delicate. The changing volume and shape from link to link make for a more pleasing visual journey and give further dimension to the theme of memory.
Display Concerns
I wanted to hang the chain with some length of it coiling on the floor. To test if the chain could support its own weight, I tested some less robust links to see how much weight they could hold. Hanging from my bedroom door knob, I added a shoe per day until the links started to pull apart. The weight of the shoes at breaking point was far more than the weight of the chain.
Strength test: hanging shoes from weakest link design
Combination of hanging and shelves to disperse weight
The Toll
The Toll, 2024, acrylic on ash wood, 26 x 10 x 2 inch
Kronos’ Lullaby
Kronos at the cradle
I swallow the children of my animal mind and wounded heart
They lie in my stomach like stone
Destined to return and destroy me
Hope
The worst gift is hope
It churns within my ribcage; a rabid pacing of its cell
Mad, but vigilant, and focused on escape
Hungry, but I shan't feed it
A lie
Pity has me sliding crumbs between the gaps
It's good at getting its teeth through the spaces to bite
I still run my fingers across the bars
Neglected, teased, and trapped
If freed, it would consume me like a starving thing
Snapping sinew and wet choking
No, don't give me hope
Give me truth and the slap of pain that follows
Better a red cheek than a ripped throat
No, don't give me the lie of hope
The Taste of Death
If you could taste, we'd taste the same metal tang:
The obol on your tongue
The blood on mine
Coins or credit cards?
The credit cards felt distracting, grabbing the eye too quickly and keeping it. The coins feel a little more like they belong there until we realize they don't.
Eyes open or closed?
The open eyes felt too much like life or horror. I wanted a subtler horror: pretty, at rest, mouth stuffed with coins.
Where is the light?
How should she be displayed?
I'm still thinking about this and still may try displaying it upside down, in the future. The boat would be floating to the viewer, instead of away, possibly alluding to responsibility for the dead and putting them in the place of the decision maker. The odd angle may also represent the strangeness, and sometimes wrongness, of the traditions and timelines we've come to accept.
I display her upright currently, thinking about how people view a body once all the arrangement have been made. The audience is at her funeral.
Mercurial Memory
Mercurial Memory, 2024, soldered glass, 138 x 2 x 2 inch
Rest May Solve It
Rest may solve it, but I cannot
My body is confused
When I lie down, it is ready to run
When I stand, it drags and lurches
If only I could sleep standing up
My head above my shoulders
My dreams would be sky and stars and open-air
They would look down on the world and see its beauty
They would show me my own
I only sleep with my head at the height of my feet
Dirt and rocks and worms and bones
And I don't even do that anymore
While working on this piece, I was thinking a lot about the rhythm of memory and mood. Nearly two years since my mom’s passing, I can see the undulating pattern of my grief experience: dark, light, dark, light, dark, light. Similarly, happy memories can spur more happy memories or sadness. What feels like a single memory often fluctuates in clarity and detail throughout. I was also struggling with sleep at the time, so I was hyper aware of my sleep cycle and sensitive to night creeping into day: a cycle of light and dark became incredibly important to my physical and mental wellbeing.
The light and dark created by the flow from clear glass, to black opaque and back again is important, but so are the resulting shadows. Due to the characteristics of the glass, the shadows maintain the cadence of the physical artwork. It’s almost like the pattern is repeating on another plane, alluding to conscious vs subconscious, memory vs truth, and perception vs reality.
The only sketch
Copper foiling cut glass
Individual fingers are taped together to keep the right pieces together
Fingers ready for soldering
Mourning Veil
Mourning Veil, 2024, soldered glass, 10 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 5 inch
In this work, I was thinking about mourning clothing and death masks. I did not feel ready to face the public at my mother's funeral, wishing to both hide and lash out*: death masks once served as protection for the dead (Gorvett, 2024, para. 4)**.
I made a mask for the bereaved, serving as protection for the griever and those they interact with. The glass is strong but fragile and forms fingers that wrap around the face, as we might cover our own when distressed, or the eyes of others to protect them. The fingers also link my earlier works where they represent loss and remembrance.
Inside, sharp, glass shards grow toward the wearer. You can imagine them sinking into flesh, holding the mask in place. The internal world is dangerous and painful. The grief is too new and sharp to be safely displayed outwardly, but it is also beautiful, the clear and shining shards mingling with the darker as they grow out from the center. The clear and bright pieces are harder to reach and the most protected.
*See Studio Diary: Funeral Reflection
Gorvett, Z. (2024) The lost art of the death mask. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240209-the-lost-art-of-the-death-mask (Accessed: 3 October 2024).
Methods and Materials
The future of glass
I didn’t expect to become entrenched and enamored with glass, as I have*. I’m enjoying discovering the boundaries and pushing them as I puzzle out constructing 3d objects. I would like to make more masks, and I'm interested in a transition to wearable pieces that aren’t only masks: glass armour, of a sort.
I’m also considering merging the different threads of my practice, bringing glass and wood together. The richness of each material hints at providing an even deeper creative well when combined.
*See Critical Reflection for further discussion of glass as an artistic material
Practical concerns of strength and fragility
There is an element of strength and fragility in much of my work: glass chains, thick metal chains attached to glass, brutal honesty about intimate pain. Despite the conceptual conversations, most of the work is quite fragile and requires thoughtful handling: the glass chain that will pull or twist itself apart if set down wrong, the jump rings in the Mourning Jewelry pieces that open if the thick chain they are attached to is shifted the wrong way. I have wrestled with the practical difficulty of transporting and showing such pieces. I’ve watched them be roughly handled by gallery workers that regularly handle art and realized that “rough” is relative. The question becomes, what is the balance between practical and conceptual? I think my work needs to hold a real element of fragility: if I’m being honest in the work, the fragility shouldn’t be an illusion. The common thread between my wellbeing and that of the work is not lost on me. People don’t always know how to handle grievers, or don’t know when they have been too rough; their intention is rarely to cause harm. While I am open to exploring the creation of sturdier work, I don’t want to be overly focused on practical concerns to the point of limiting creativity. There is a balance to strike which will likely involve detailed handling and installation instructions, possibly through video. There may also be a point where the thoughtful installation becomes a part of the work itself.