Project Ten Ten Ten

This monumental glass sculpture is named for its location at the threshold of the craft and design galleries at Mint Museum Uptown, guiding visitors in. Its 800 stacked sheets of glass undulate in front of colored glass objects made in Lane’s studio, as well as pieces of wood. Danny Lane describes it as a sculpture to be experienced: “The viewer activates it. As you walk by, things appear to move. Really, I think the purpose in making art is to make something…that elevates the soul.”

Thicket is located on the Sally and Bill Van Allen Terrace near the entrance of Mint Museum Uptown. Inspired by the history of blacksmithing, Thicket is composed of stainless-steel rods and clusters of cast iron hammer heads. For blacksmith and sculptor Tom Joyce, hammers symbolize “an inherent potential embodied within all tools employed in the hands of makers.” The hammer heads are made from a unique alloy that includes steel filings and iron grindings reserved from nearly all of Joyce’s hundreds of projects, which often used recycled metal. Thus, Thicket carries the “molecular memory” of cultures from around the world.

Salmon Spawning Run, by Susan Point, is installed in the wood gallery at Mint Museum Uptown. This red cedar roundel features carved and painted salmon and clusters of eggs. Much more than stylized images of animals, the salmon characters reflect the great significance of the salmon as giver of life to the Musqueam First Nation, as well as shared universal concerns of preservation of the environment and sustainability. The vibrant eggs complete the fish’s lifecycle, as the renewal of wild salmon (still caught using traditional methods) is critical to keeping Mother Earth in balance.

This console is the first functional piece created from Irish cabinetmaker Joseph Walsh’s Movement series. Made of bleached and white oiled ash, with green lacquer details, Enignum Motion uses light and shadow, positive and negative space, to give the appearance of movement, and includes an actual moving element: a row of articulated wood slats on its top can be raised and lowered as one unit. Enignum, a word coined by Walsh, combines “enigma,” meaning “mystery,” with “lignum,” the Latin word for wood.

Cristina Córdova’s figural sculpture, Preludios y Partidas, commands a wall at one end of the ceramics gallery on Level 3 at Mint Museum Uptown. Of this subtle yet powerful psychological work, Córdova says: “In understanding this piece as a metaphorical topography, I wanted to use the title to hint as to what that corresponding psycho-emotional space would be. This landscape is one of transition and like the reference to the distillment of reason and logic from uncertainty and chaos, these figures are in the preliminary charged states (preludios) before a great action (partidas). Although the floating concrete elements could hint of the residual vestiges of a previous reality, I am not thinking of it as further leading to an ending but to the beginning of a new cycle. Common to the human experience are profound shifts where the ground gives way and one is thrust into powerful periods of self-reflection, growth, and renewed vision; this is how this space looks in my mind right before the next grand launch."

Ayala Serfaty’s evocative light sculpture, Joy of Transition, adorns a corner of the Design Gallery on Level 3 of Mint Museum Uptown. Delicate, ethereal, and fragile, this sculpture is made from glass rods individually heated with a torch and formed into abstract shapes that evoke the natural world. The glass forms are sprayed with a polymer coating and lit from behind so that they glow from within.

Joy of Transition is part of a series of light sculptures called SOMA—the Greek word for the human body, chosen to suggest the sculptures’ connection to living beings. The title has many possible interpretations, including the evolution of art, craft, and design, and the opening of the new building at Mint Museum Uptown in 2010.

Urban Color Palette, Charlotte, offers a visual representation of the value of that which is usually overlooked and neglected. Hildur Bjarnadóttir visited Charlotte in March 2010 and gathered local plants from roadsides and vacant lots near the Urban Ministry, an interfaith organization in Uptown Charlotte that aims to end homelessness. Then, she boiled the plants to create dyes that she used to dye wool yarn from Icelandic sheep, using the lobby of the former location of the Mint Museum of Craft + Design as her studio, allowing visitors to ask her questions as she worked. Although usually considered weeds, the plants she gathered yielded a remarkable array of colors, such as off white, yellow, brown, and red, as seen in the squares and rectangles that she crocheted from the yarn in Iceland and ultimately installed on a wall of the Bresler Family Fiber Gallery at Mint Museum Uptown. The plants included clover, dandelion flowers, and chickweed, among others.

For Kate Malone, pots are like people and people are like pots—vessels ready to be filled with knowledge and friendship. Inspired by her world travels, the people she meets and the growth processes of nature, Malone aims to convey energy, vitality and optimism in her ceramics.

Mr. and Mrs. Tutti Atomic capture the feeling of family, community and fun that Malone sensed as the honoree at the 2011 Founders’ Circle Gala at the Mint Museum of Craft + Design, which sponsored this Project Ten Ten Ten commission. Mrs. Tutti Frutti, a short, sturdy, and vibrant pot meant to convey a life force and the promise of growth, had already been conceived when Malone visited the Mint. She was struck by the sense of family and fun at the institution, and knew that Mrs. needed a Mr. Mr. Atomic, although taller, does not dominate his clay wife. His muted colors and more attenuated form provide a balance—the couple truly completes each other. Malone sees her creations as two separate entities coming together, where one plus one somehow equals three (three, of course, being the Mint Museum).