National glass Centre based artists feature at Venice Biennale

Released: Monday 1st June 2015 at 15:09

Emotional Leak sculpture exhibited at Glasstress 2015

Erin Dickson and Jeffrey Sarmiento’s collaboration Emotional Leak has been included in a major exhibition in conjunction with the 56th Venice Biennale. Glasstress Gotika brings together contemporary art and historical objects loaned from the State Hermitage Museum collection. Curated by Director of Hermitage 20/21 Dimitri Ozerkov and Adriano Berengo, the exhibition explores ‘how medieval ideas and communication methods have imperceptibly crept into our modern conscience despite our technological advances and how the Gothic concept influences contemporary art’.

Based in North East England, Dickson and Sarmiento share a fascination with cultural and emotional connections to architecture. In Emotional Leak, the artists have produced the physical manifestation of a slowly leaking roof. Inspired by water, the resulting form is a four metre-tall black monolithic sculpture, made from stacked glass layers to resemble a digital gothic architectural model. Tina Oldknow, Curator of Modern Glass at The Corning Museum of Glass, has described Emotional Leak as ‘a black stalagmite…it looks soft, eroded, and earthlike, yet it is also otherworldly’.

Erin Dickson graduated from the Architectural Association in London, and is currently completing a PhD combining architectural phenomenology, technology and glass. Educated at Rhode Island School of Design, Jeffrey Sarmiento is Reader in Glass at the University of Sunderland.

For further information:
http://www.glasstress.org/event_2015/artists/16
http://jeffreysarmiento.co.uk
http://erindickson.co.uk

GLASSTRESS 2015 GOTIKA
The 56th International Art Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia
9 May – 22 November 2015

Palazzo Franchetti / Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere e Arti
(Venetian Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts)
Campo S. Stefano, 2847 Venice

Berengo Foundation (Berengo Centre for Contemporary Art and Glass)
Campiello della Pescheria, Murano

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