Kirsten Glass: Light Trance Works

Kirsten Glass’s Light Trance Works are small canvases first conceived by the artist as a means of shedding everyday consciousness before she begins her larger abstract/figurative paintings. Working in a light trance is a deliberate method, as Glass says, to get out of her own way. She experiences this as a dissolving of her sense of identity and reforming it at will in a rhythmic expansion and contraction. In occult teaching, this can be described as visiting the astral plane. 

 Working on several paintings at once, Glass uses dark and bright colours, sand and glitter to create textured abstract compositions. With a compass, she scratches flowing lines and patterns from sacred geometry into the canvases, revealing underlayers of paint. This digging out of energies and patterns also provides a shorthand for expressing the unseen realities of the natural universe. To Glass, art is potentially the manifestation of a spiritual, magical process whether artists realise it or not. 

Each work contains distinct sections, an approach rooted in the collage mentality of her earlier work. This is another painterly means of setting up an interplay of visual and textual difference where the eventual harmony offers its own subtle narrative surprise or unexpected sense of presence. The resulting head-sized canvases are liminal landscapes infused with the boundless energy of a dream space. Working in a light trance, to Glass, is to be in collaboration with the astral plane. 

Karsten Schubert London is pleased to present this viewing room in anticipation of Glass's forthcoming solo show in Room 2.