Tribute to the Trinity

Tribute to the Trinity consists of three devitrified glass sex toys, symbolic of the Church and sexuality. Devitrification creates a milky haze on the surface of glass, molecules crystallize and become ‘unglass-like,’ causing the glass to become opaque and brittle. Devitrification can be cause by a number of reasons, such as using two incompatible glasses together, or how the glass has been heated and cooled. Devitrification can be understood as tension and stress within the glass, causing fragility and potential to break. Devitrification is something that glass artisans avoid and consider a ‘failure,’ as the glass is unstable and lacking the desired transparency usually associated with the material.

Codognato’s The Truth in Glass suggests the materiality of glass focuses on the very question of seeing, understood both as physical and intellectual- serving as the starting point for analysing the relationship between vision and knowledge, and subjectivity and objectivity -and in so can reflect power dynamics (Codognato 2013). Glass is also a powerful medium to explore perspective, as its commonness in architecture and objects, has made its way into the collective imagination of humankind (Codognato 2013).

The relationship between glass and vision/knowledge/perspective is important in the conceptualisation of Tribute to the Trinity. Through devitrification, the glass that was once clear becomes clouded, acting as a metaphor for the clouded perspective and judgement tension can create. The tension, stress and uneasy of devitrified glass- embodies the tension and stress that exists between homosexuals and the church’s perspective of homosexuality. In which the Church sexualises homosexuality so that it can be condemned. As well as the internalised homophobia experienced by homosexuals raised in the Church, this tension - similar to devitrification, is not only unstable it is unsustainable.