UMCP MFA

For immediate release: February 10, 2010

Felicia Glidden has been added to the roster of artists represented by the Marion Royael Gallery in Beacon, New York. Her work can be seen in an exhibition at the gallery through March 10, 2010

What: Sculptor Felicia Glidden at the Marion Royael Gallery
Artist Reception Feb 13. 2010 6-10 pm
Where: 460 Main St., Beacon, N.Y.
When: through March 10, 2010
Contact: Steven Riddle, Barbara Riddle, at (727) 244 5535
info@marionroyaelgallery.com


In Brief: Felicia Glidden, a sculptor from the north woods of Minnesota, brings the forces of nature and the psyche into the gallery in the form of striking cast iron and bronze sculptures that resonate on many levels.


Katherine Sharpe, writing recently in the Field Museum’s Seed magazine on Minneapolis’s very popular art-into-life Art Shanty Project, now in its sixth year, writes about the Ped Pex Power Pod, Felicia Glidden’s brainchild, in which participants generate power for coffeemaking and other uses by pedaling on bike frames. “Glidden, a former engineering student, believes that science and art are united by their physical approach to the world,” notes Sharpe. “She became interested in alternative energy while researching whether she could practice sustainable metal casting. Ped Pex is an installation, but it’s also a real experiment in process.”
Glidden’s approach to art has one window open to science, engineering, and technology—her casting process is innovative and experimental, and she helped build the cupolette Aurora for the North Shore Iron Pours that she helped found.
There is also, however, a window open to mysticism in Glidden’s work. Living for many years on the shore of Lake Superior, she developed a way of seeing spirit in matter that seems to grow out of the soil in that region. She lived her commitment to a community of artists and musicians, gathering them around her for days-long music and dance, and involving them in the iron pours that increasingly became a focus for this wide-ranging artist.
Her current long-running series, Matris Fe, or “Mother Iron,” looks back to ancient northern iron mysticisms—the spirit of iron is depicted as a rough heavy head, exploding into shards of energy. This powerful imagery is created in part by the will of the artist, but it also leaves a window open to the mysterious workings of the molten iron itself: a role is always allotted to chance.
Her show at the Marion Royael Gallery will focus on these essential cast metal works, as well as others in which Glidden’s consciousness of process and spirit of adventure are plain. She is calling the spirit of metal to dwell in these forms, to shape them in ways that speak to us across a vast space of material difference: how does metal become knowable by flesh? How can flesh participate in the nature of metal?