Penelope Comfort Starr has been working in glass for over 40 years, with over 170 commissioned pieces in corporate, public and private environments. Her work has been published widely. Her formal education is in design, architecture and environmental planning: Harvard University AB & MCP. She also studied color at Yale with Josef Albers, and landscape design in the SF Bay Area. In the mid 1980's she switched from stained glass to three dimensional work.
Her works have an understated elegance based on Zen principles of harmony, respect, purity and tranquility. While not overtly spiritual, they often evoke a spiritual response. They move us out of our everyday existence by providing the viewer a reason to pause.
For the past few years she has been working primarily in cast glass in somewhat discrete series. The series so far:
• “Archival Footprints”(TM) tiles using materials from her family’s archives;
• “Detritus of War” using rock forms and family letters to show the debris left behind by war;
• “Fossil Forms”, including 20th century fossils; and
• “The Mill is Closed” honoring the lost manufacturing capability of mills throughout New England .
One of the Archival Footprints (TM) series was awarded a cash prize in 2006 by the California Department of Conservation as an example of creative use of recycled glass having production potential. The Detritus of War series was selected as a finalist in 2007 for the Raphael Prize in Glass by the Society for Contemporary Crafts in Pittsburgh, PA. Work from that show is still traveling.
ARTISTS'S STATEMENT ON RECYCLING: Many of the materials I use are found or recycled. Winning an award as Artist-in-Residence at San Francisco's Recycling Center and Solid Waste Transfer Station(now Recology) in 1995 both validated my recycling habits and gave me access to new materials. In 2001 I was Artist-in-Residence for a special project involving children at Marin Resource Recovery in San Rafael, CA. In 2006 I began working almost exclusively with recycled glass in my cast glass pieces. Most of my pieces are not readily recognizable as incorporating recycled materials because I feel strongly that art from recycled materials does not necessarily have to be funny or funky.
In 2010:
• Memory & Transition O'Hanlon Center for the Arts, Mill Valley, CA ,
• innovations in contemporary crafts at Richmond Art Center, CA Jurors: Garry Knox Bennett & Nancy Selvin. Open through August 21, 2010
• Art at the Dump: Twenty Years of the Artist in Residence Program at Recology at Intersection 5M. 925 Mission St. Opening Wed., July 21, 6-9 pm
My series Detritus of War, submitted for the national Raphael Prize in Glass, was selected as a finalist. The finalists' show, opening at the Society for Contemporary Craft in 2007 as Transformation 6: Contemporary Works in Glass , is still traveling . Its final stop is at the Hunter Museum of American Art in Chattanooga, TN through early 2011.
