ANNE PEABODY
United States
2018
Glass, sterling silver leaf, paint, gold dust
Nine panels 18″ x 24″ each

“I grew up in rural Kentucky and have been drawn to nature as a source of inspiration for as long as I can remember. My recent drawings on silvered glass recall stories from my youth and recapture feelings and experiences I’ve had while wandering through the woods.” In 2012, Anne Peabody was selected by a group of international curators for Glass Quarterly as one of the 50 Best Artists working in Glass, alongside glass greats Dale Chihuly and Stephen Rolphe Powell as well as internationally known multimedia artists Kiki Smith, Dan Flavin and Fred Wilson. Anne was born in Louisville, Kentucky; she lives and works in Brooklyn. “Given the nature of her chosen medium, light is a vital participant in the elusive compositions. Her works on silvered glass are created using a technique streaming from églomisé, a French glass-gilding technique popularized in the eighteenth century, whose ephemeral results emphasize the delicacy of the subject-matter.” (glasstress.org)

Peabody’s works have been included in group and solo shows including the Venice Biennale, “Art Walks the Runway,” Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, “Glasstress,” Millesgarden Museum, Stockholm Sweden, “Site 92: Phase 2,” Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, and “New York City’s 40 Years: 40 Artists.” She has been commissioned to make permanent installations for 21c Museums in Louisville, Kentucky, Cincinnati, Ohio and Bentonville, Arkansas and has done multiple permanent architectural installations for architect Peter Marino, Deborah Berke and Associates, and others. Her work has been critically reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, The New York Times, Glass Quarterly, Curatedmag, the Art Newspaper, The Huffington Post, The Wall Street Journal and Artdaily.

To us, Anne Peabody’s drawings on glass are dreamscapes–they are altered by what they reflect: the light, surrounding colors, the other objects in the room including the viewer, who is always inside the work, subtly in its reflection. “Swamp” is a nine-panel landscape which utterly changes the space. The viewer is drawn into it as one is drawn to the clearing in a forest, as one wants to enter the almost abstract worlds in Chinese scrolls and Japanese screens. The artist writes, “I came upon this scene while exploring the forested wetlands of South Carolina with my husband. Gold dust in this drawing reminds me of the bright yellow pollen that blanketed the scene, glittering over all of the foliage and beautifully obscuring reflections in the water.”

The entire work, installed as photographed, is 57″ x 75″