The Music of the Spheres: Art Works of Mark Matthews

Mark Matthews has been making marbles for 35 years. Some—the banded lutzes and opaques, the latticino and solid and vane cores, the clambroths, onionskins, and peppermints—acknowledge their nineteenth century roots. Others—the precision air traps, the filigranas, the graals—employ techniques never before used in the making of marbles. Matthews makes marbles—spherical glass objects, to be sure, but glass spheres invested with a meaning, a significance, an aesthetic vision and purpose. In this sense, the marble is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Aesthetics—issues of form and color theory—combine with investigations into the physical and chemical properties of glass, which, in turn, engage social history and economic concerns, and all in the unlikely form of the marble, a crystalline sphere which, in Matthews’ hands, produces its own kind of music.