Mould-blown glass and hand-blown glass, cast from a five-litre plastic water container, 2021
The Sítio Bottles series (2018–) now consists of over fifty pieces. For this recent iteration (2021), I incorporated the ancient Italian technique known as Millefiori: glass is pulled into long rods, which are then cut into round glass beads, reheated, and incorporated into the blown glass.
“Sítio Bottles ... 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 ... suspended from trees filled for stray cats to drink from or [used] 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, Sobey Art Award Catalogue 2021.
Lorna Bauer examines humans’ relationships with their surroundings through a material and visual investigation into ideas and experiences generated from ecologies of lived environments. Bauer lives and works in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montréal; her work has been featured in solo and collective 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). She has been artist in residence at Despina (Rio de Janeiro), Les Récollets (Paris), the Québec-New York Residency, Banff Centre, the Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida), and the Glenfiddich Artist in Residence program (Dufftown, Scotland). Her works are the collections of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. Bauer received the Barbara Spohr Memorial Award for contemporary Canadian photography (2019) and was a finalist for the Sobey Art Award (2021). She is currently the artist in residence at Concordia University in Studio Arts.