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~ Wave of Glass ~
In the break for lunch, I headed for the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, situated close to the Fry building. With Francesco Turci's talk on the transition of glass from liquid to solid in mind, I was delighted to stumble across a glass sculpture of a wave as a part of the Eastern Art section. The exhibit as titled “Ku” which has a complex meaning in Japanese. Superficially it means “emptiness”, but there is an implication that this is an expanding, rotating space contained within a fragile, transient, dynamic shell. The philosophical overtones are of a soul, a spirit, contained within a body, and indeed the museum had added the translation “Free Essence”, but with little else to explain what the artist, Ikuta Niyoko, would have hoped to convey with this magnificent piece. It's not the object itself but the ideas surrounding it. Like mathematical symbols on a page.
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