Susan Edgerley - Artist's Statement

Exploring glass in relationship with other materials has allowed me, over the past 25 years, to develop a personal and richly textured visual dialogue which explores themes of indentity, community, existence and the human condition.  Glass with its enticing transparency yet solid impregnability remains a seductive and elusive medium full of contradictions:

fragile, solid, hard, strong

                                 transparent, translucent, opaque

                              fluid, soft , malleable

                              colourful, clear

                                                  tactile,

                       hot, warm, cold

                                   sharp, smooth, rough

                                      textured

                       mirror, reflect, refract

                                          brittle, break, shatter

                                                  
What better material with which to express the diversity and complexity of human existence:  its power, its mystery, its beauty and its pain.  Glass is the fragile metaphor with which I can ponder, struggle with and create those things which live inside me.