Contemporary Craft in Focus: The Birth of Eve

I also felt ​‘in sync’ with glass. When I was a painter, I painted fast and furiously and ultimately threw everything out. This didn’t happen with glass because it was so labor intensive. The tedium factor and the variety of processes allowed me to focus and concentrate. By the time I managed to do something to the glass, I had developed feelings of attachment and was hardly going to throw it away.

Judith Schaechter

Artwork for me is a way of creating an instance, an isolated singularity, as record of the moment’s own theoretical existence — like a cross section or a core sample of a single immediate ​“now,” flash frozen for contemplation at another time. In my work, there is narrative, but one that I hope defies any sense of past or present — it is a narrative in which those possibilities are impossible and exist in favor of a sort of eternal present. When I work with the image of the human figure, I imagine it to have arisen spontaneously as it is seen in the image and to remain there unchanging for eternity, suspended in whatever context I imagined for it at the time. I don’t see a story with a beginning or an end, although I think it is possible for others to see a more temporal linear story. I work hard to eradicate clues of history in my work — even the most neutral clothing or minute detail can identify the time in which the piece was created. My characters don’t have a biography. Like dolls, they are there to adapt to the immediate needs of the player.

Why all this insistence on the here and now? Because infinity, the eternal, if it can be experienced at all, must be felt in the subdivisions of the present. And really, visual art is a great way to create that singular moment as it exists more obviously in space and not time.

Judith Schaechter