My series "Archetypical Architectures as Found and Imagined Around Latheronwheel," draws on the cultural history of glass, specifically the history of glass in both vernacular and sacred architecture. This work is a continuation of my "Imaginary Crystallisations Series" and merges the architectural ruins and stone structures found in the Caithness, Scotland, region with the idea of glass as linked to a simulacrum of naturally occurring crystals and semi-precious stones.

 

The German Expressionists in the early 20th century sought to reinterpret, in an eclectic fashion, the glass-crystal symbolism as a metaphor for transformation of a post-war society in both aesthetic and social terms. They embraced a mode of expression that was streaked with Romantic sensibility, curiosity in the irrational, and heightened sensory awareness.

 

The basic orthogonal system that underlies most of Western architecture is mainly ignored in my work to such a degree that the intentionally disorienting, colorful, and translucent glass forms emerge as a transfigured extension of nature, an artificial crystal that amalgamates with mountainous crystal formations.

 

The sculptural forms are not intended or perceived as fixed and measurable, nor as an ideal conjunction of forms. On the contrary, if there is an ideal, it is in the shifting kaleidoscopic forms that are continuously moving out of chaos toward a potential perfection, which is, however, never fully attained and always in the process of becoming.

 

Stine Bidstrup is a Danish glass artist, educator, and art historian whose work and research explores optical phenomena, and interprets and brings ideas about utopian, architectural visions to life through glass sculptures, installation and video. 
 
Bidstrup holds art degrees from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art, Copenhagen; and a degree in art history from The University of Copenhagen. She has taught nationally and internationally since 2007 at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art, School of Design; University of Wisconsin-Madison; and at several summer programs including Pilchuck Glass School, Stanwood, Washington, and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine. She maintains a studio in Copenhagen, and is represented by Heller Gallery in New York, FUMI Gallery in London and Hosteler Burrows in Los Angeles. In 2018, Bidstrup joined the exhibition council at Glasmuseet Ebeltoft, and in 2019, she was awarded a three-year work grant from The Danish Arts Foundation. In 2021, she curated the 8th Tallinn Applied Art Triennial at the Kai Art Center in Estonia.