Description

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Mark Matthews has been making marbles for 35 years. Some--the banded lutzes and opaques, the latticino and solid and vane cores, the clambroths, onionskins, and peppermints--acknowledge their nineteenth century roots. Others--the precision air traps, the filigranas, the graals--employ techniques never before used in the making of marbles. Matthews makes marbles--spherical glass objects, to be sure, but glass spheres invested with a meaning, a significance, an aesthetic vision and purpose. In this sense, the marble is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Aesthetics--issues of form and color theory--combine with investigations into the physical and chemical properties of glass, which, in turn, engage social history and economic concerns, and all in the unlikely form of the marble, a crystalline sphere which, in Matthews' hands, produces its own kind of music.