Artists selected for the 2009 BIGG: Breakthrough Ideas in Global Glass are:

Artist Statement
My mixed-media sculptures explore the intersecting issues of history, memory, and the museum as history-maker.  Working with a variety of fragile and ephemeral materials-- such as glass, sugar, and paraffin-- I create ghosted “art/ifacts” caught in an arrested state of dissolution, as they fade from actuality and linger only as memories.  Re-presented in dark mahogany museum cases, these constructed histories examine the transitory moments where personal memory and collective history are made and lost. The Mariposa mori series can be seen as a visual meditation on ideas of the fragile, the fleeting, beauty lost, and memory transformed.  These impossibly delicate-looking pâte de verre butterflies have been stripped of their most obvious enchantment—their beautiful color and patterns—and now remain as mere ghosts of their former selves, all the more striking despite their loss...

Biography
Michael Crowder is a mixed media sculptor who exhibits across the US and internationally. Originally from New Orleans, he is currently based in Houston, Texas. His conceptually-driven sculpture often incorporates museum “art/ifacts” made of glass particles fused together in a variation of the ancient pâte de verre technique. Exploring ideas of fragility and impermanence, his work is sometimes cast using very ephemeral materials—from sugar or chocolate to marble dust or cigarette ashes. He was recently honored with nomination for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award and an Artist-in-Residence Fellowship at the Dora Maar House in Ménerbes, France.

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