Mould-blown glass and hand-blown glass, cast from 5-liter plastic water containers, 2021
The Sítio Bottles series (2018–ongoing) now consists of over fifty pieces. For this iteration, Bauer incorporated the ancient Italian technique known as Millefiori (which means “a thousand flowers”). Glass is designed and pulled into long rods, which are then cut into round glass beads, reheated and incorporated into the blown glass, and worked while still hot.
“Sítio Bottles was produced in response to [Bauer’s] research in Rio and took the form of blown-glass vessels—cast from portable water containers—that were an embodiment of both the human lung and the overabundance of plastic water bottles that are strewn across the beach or populate urban scenes, and which are also used for numerous purposes such as suspended from trees for stray cats to drink from or as jugs for growing various orchid species. The vessels themselves are a visual metaphor for the blowing lungs that created them as a life form and form of life.”
— Dominique Fontaine, from the Sobey Art Award Catalogue 2021.
Lorna Bauer uses photography and sculpture to examine humans’ relationships with their surroundings. Her projects are site-related, responding to a specific place and context and speaking to a material and visual investigation into ideas and experiences generated from ecologies of living environments. Her work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Fonderie Darling (Montréal), Franz Kaka (Toronto), and Eleftheria Tseliou Gallery (Athens). Bauer received the Barbara Spohr Memorial Award (2019) and was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award (2021).