Jone Kvie

Jone Kvie’s glass works were produced during a residency at CIRVA (Centre International de Recherche sur le Verre et les Arts plastiques) in Marseille in 2016. The residency was undertaken with Jimmie Durham, with whom Kvie had been in artistic exchange for several years at this point. At CIRVA, both artists worked with glass for the first time in their respective practices. The works were subsequently presented in a duo exhibition with Durham at Michel Rein in 2017 and have not been exhibited since.

For Kvie, glass became a way of extending concerns already central to his sculptural practice: matter, transformation, geological processes, and the relationship between the human body and forces that operate on vastly different scales. Some of the works developed through an interest in flow and volcanic activity; others were cast directly into wet sand, with Kvie using his hands to shape the negative space into which the molten glass was poured. The resulting forms bring together traces of the body with a material whose behaviour remains volatile and difficult to fully control.

In Kvie’s works, glass is not treated primarily for its refinement, transparency, or decorative associations. Instead, Kvie approaches it as an unstable material caught between states – formed through extreme heat, flow, and cooling, and carrying within it the possibility of fracture.

Seen again now, a decade after they were made, the works retain this tension between human gesture and geological transformation, between something shaped by hand and something that seems to belong to a much larger material process.