Michael Aschenbrenner

Michael Aschenbrenner

I have never thought of my work as simply making objects out of glass. I have been trying to discover what an object can become when it is stripped of its ordinary purpose and given another life. Glass allows me to do that. It carries light, but it also carries weight. It can appear permanent, yet it can break. It can preserve a form while completely changing its meaning. Those contradictions are at the center of my work. I am drawn to things that already carry history—bones, tools, implements, fragments, things that have been used, damaged, worn, or discarded. I don’t want to make them perfect. I want to expose something within them.

The Damaged Bone Series is about more than the physical structure of bone. For me, bone becomes a language for memory, mortality, endurance, and the vulnerability of the human body. When I translate it into glass, the object becomes both familiar and alien. It is no longer simply bone. It becomes a meditation on what remains.

The Implement Series comes from my fascination with objects created for a purpose. A tool is an extension of the human hand. It carries evidence of work, force, repetition, and intention. By removing the object from its practical function, I allow it to exist in another way—as sculpture, memory, and idea.

I have always been interested in that moment when recognition gives way to uncertainty.

You think you know what you are looking at. Then you look again. That second look is important to me. I want my work to slow the viewer down. I want the material to reveal itself gradually—the surface, the weight, the distortion, the damage, the evidence of the hand. I want the viewer to encounter the work physically before deciding what it means.

My work is not about making glass beautiful. It is about using glass to make us look again at things we think we already understand.

After a lifetime of working with this material, I still believe that the most interesting place for an artist is between what an object was and what it might become. 

M. Aschenbrenner