Between Heaven and Earth part I. The Evening Service
Between Heaven and Earth part I. The Evening Service
By Myriam Thomas
Couldn't load pickup availability
Stock level: 1 left
Item details:
17 x 19 x 11 cm
In the Low Countries, mainly in Flanders, beguinages were established from the 13th century onwards. Beguinages were, as it were, "towns within a town" for women who wanted to lead a devout life "together in seclusion" without taking a monastic vow. From 1940 onwards, the number of beguines declined sharply, and in Flanders, the beguine movement has since completely died down.
I recently discovered in the Image Archive of the city of Ghent (Belgium) a series of old photos of daily life around 1920 in the Great Beguinage in Sint-Amandsberg near Ghent. For me, this was the trigger to try to capture the spirituality the hope, the doubt, the joy of the women in those photos, in a small-scale installation.
Using those photos from the image archive as starting material, I made some 3D viewing boxes. Each viewing box measures about 17 cm x 19 cm x 11 cm and contains 4 or 5 layers of glass. For this, I processed the photo material for use as kiln-fired photo decals in a 3D setting. I present here “ The Evening Service”, both the viewing box and the original historical photo that I used as starting material.
About Myriam Thomas
The art career of Myriam Thomas developed organically. As an 18-year-old she asked herself: "Am I going to choose art or am I going to choose science?” Belonging to the first generation to get the chance to study further, she chose sciences and she became a chemistry teacher, with a lot of commitment and enthusiasm.
However, her desire to develop her artistic language remained, and at some point, she began to experiment at home with waste glass more or less intuitively in a homemade primitive kiln. Very soon she realized that she had to look for a good glass art education, so she decided to enroll in the Glass Art Department at the Institute for Arts and Craft (IKA) in Mechelen, Belgium. There she graduated in 2020 and since then she has worked as a professional glass artist.
The themes that form an inexhaustible source of fascination and inspiration for Myriam almost always have to do with stories. Old stories and new stories- and about how they determine our identities. In each of her artistic projects, she tries to transform her ideas and emotions into glass creations that invite the viewer to moments of rest, reflection, and contemplation.
Myriam has built up a stock of glass techniques from which she draws depending on which story, which emotion she wants to convey. She likes especially to work with stains and kiln-fired paints and with cyanotype on glass, which is a photographic procedure from the beginning of photography.