Soft Connections (Love and Champagne)

Soft Connections (Love and Champagne) is a very fine example of Maria Bang Espersen’s remarkable glassmaking, where the artist stretches and folds the glass, ultimately creating unique pieces in a process that combines control and serendipity.

Espersen creates her glass sculptures in a playful way where the process is joyful, wild and full of action. Her material is a 900°C molten mass, shifting between malleable and stiff in a matter of seconds. Her rapidly created sculptures come together under two opposing forces: control and serendipity. Governed by the technical challenges and difficulties related to the craft, traditional glassmaking is generally based on following precise rules. Espersen, however, messes with that by creating objects that are made fast and without the typical tools, creating prime conditions for the artist and the glass to work spontaneously together.

Espersen’s process clashes with the unyielding forces of gravity and time, compelling her to free herself from her own preconditioned notions - of good form and perfect technique. Espersen needs her focus to be 100%, or this delicate relation will undoubtedly collapse, yet she can never fully predict the outcome, and she never has complete control. In conjunction with her participation in the Révélations Biennial at Grand Palais in Paris, 2025, Espersen described her approach to glassmaking:

My practice often starts with a very broad, open question such as: What happens if I do this to glass? This way, a conversation between me and the glass starts and from then on, it is very much about me observing what the glass is trying to communicate. It is a way for me to discover something new and exciting, that I could never have simply thought up on my own. I think of my final art works as collaborations between me and the material. The “techniques” I decide to develop are always the kind that I cannot 100% control. I want some things to be reserved for the unexpected. Over the past 10-15 years, much has happened in the Scandinavian glass scene. A new generation of artists looking to explore glass in unconventional ways have emerged and I consider myself part of this movement. […] I decided early on in my career that I would not be pursuing traditional techniques. Instead, I wanted to play with the material and get to know it without forcing it into shape. Today my approach to glass stays experimental and investigative and I am always curious to find new ways to engage with it. Focusing on unconventional fabrication processes is a way for me to physically manifest my interest in deconstructing existing hierarchies. Conventional glass making is based on following precise and restrictive rules, but I purposefully disrupt those notions by creating objects that are made fast and with the least amount of restrictions possible.

Allowing for mistakes to be part of her process, Espersen embraces unexpected turns and lets the sculptures be what they are.In conjunction with the 2023 CFHILL exhibition, Generation Glas, in Stockholm, where the Firestorm Foundation acquired Soft Connections (Love and Champagne), Espersen expounded on this (as well as explaining how she came up with the title for the work in question):

With the pieces at CFHILL, I have actually taken some that I made years ago but put aside because they had a huge crack. Then I’ve taken a hammer and chisel and started breaking them apart. I put those pieces into the oven and then reheat them slowly, because if you go up too fast the glass will completely crack. I start making these little pieces that I throw onto the pieces that I made all these years ago. It’s a way of reusing the mistakes from my own past, but in a way where they can do something that I wouldn’t be able to do if I restricted myself to only work with what I was doing that day. By having pre-made pieces, I can work with these cut-offs that you see in some of the pieces and let them be a bit rawer. Thereby you can see both the way that the glass can appear super soft but also how it really isn’t. A lot of people that see my works don’t realise that they are glass unless they’re told it is. […] I have named two of the pieces Soft Connections, one is Love and Champagne and the other is Tough Love. They are really about the fact that the pieces that I have thrown on top of each other – the parts that look soft – are what connect the whole piece. Everything was loose until the fact that these pieces were put on top of each other, and they were so soft when they went in that they just slumped down around the original pieces and then sort of had this grip on them. The pieces are partly made out of upcycled glass, so it’s about the connections of life in a way, and how important it is that we stay connected. It can be a metaphor about how we treat our surroundings, how nature and the environment are currently falling apart but we’re trying to hold onto them. Or you can view the titles simply as love stories, it doesn’t have to be about the fact that these are partly upcycled.

Provenance

CFHILL, Stockholm, Generation Glas, 9 June - 12 August 2023.

Firestorm Foundation (acquired from the above).

Copyright Firestorm Foundation