Vicki Fanning is the third generation of her family to work closely with glass but her use of the material is quite different to her father and grandfather. Fanning's grandfather, Aubrey Fanning helped build up 'The Wanganui Glass Company' which was the main producer and distributor of etched and sandblasted doors and windows in New Zealand. These designs can be found in many homes throughout Whanganui and across New Zealand. From stags, ships, dancers and nymphs – there were many designs to choose from. As a communications technician Fanning's father Brian worked with Brazilian quartz crystal which was the first “glass” used for transmitting communications. Today glass is used in fibreoptics for our ultrafast connections to the virtual world. Fanning draws on her family connections with glass and has made three works that use designs from the original catalogue of 'The Wanganui Glass Company' as inspiration – The Beast, The Dancer and The Glade. Reproductions of these can be seen on the gallery wall and are an important reference point for the shimmering sculptures here in the space
The three sculptures were made using light and shadow, with Fanning tracing and retracing the designs to then reconstruct them into abstracted three-dimensional sculptures, made from moulded polycarbonate and covered in shimmering scales, tendrils and spikes. These are formed from clear borosilicate glass, each painstakingly manipulated through flame working.
Because the transmission of information via fibreoptics is integral to our everyday lives and the way we receive and send communication, it's easy for us to forget the mindbending magic of how this actually works. Fanning's work explores this magic with each of the sculptures resembling imagery in motion, the forms are elongated, blurry and sharp at the same time and glitching from a virtual to a real space, between fact and fiction. She has captured them in a moment of almost arrival, mid transmission.
As Fanning explains she's exploring "the idea of glass as a metaphor" as a conduit of an in-between state. The etched glass doors that were being designed and produced during her grandfather's time at the Wanganui Glass Company operated as zone dividers in homes – outside and inside, public and private. Fanning's sculptures operate in a similar way. These works are physical and gestural, changing when viewed from different angles. In creating them Fanning is also transmitting her own family history of working with glass and her connection to Whanganui. The city has, in recent years, become known as the glass hub of New Zealand, but the establishment of 'The Wanganui Glass Company' in the 1920s attests to the fact that this status is longstanding.
Greg Donson
Curator & Public Programmes Manager
Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui
