ABOUT THE ARTWORK: Echoing the birth of planets and capturing the life inside them, Sally Resnik Rockriver generates chemical reactions in blown glass and ceramics. While she is making her blown glass, Rockriver uses ceramic glazes and glass rocks to grow geolocial worlds on the interior of the hot glass vessel. These moments of chemical reaction become imaginary planets and frozen thermal formations.

Rockriver has redefined the aesthetic parameters of her medium by allowing geological laws to determine the content of her work. Rockriver arrives at a new form that she refers to as Geochemical Sculpture, in which compositions become planetary formations. She creates a narrative landscape by combining her multiple approaches: glass columns with a crystalline core, calcite cave formations, crystal glazed slabs, salt-blown spheres, ceramic blown glass vessels, and sandcast rocks. Exploring Ms. Rockriver’s works is like visiting another world where new geological formations are revealed. We can enter the high temperature moment at which these phenomena were created and marvel at the explosive interior of a crystalline birth.

NARRATIVE: From a sandcast ground erupts a ceramic glaze which fuses, melts, and crystallizes inside of a blown glass vessel. Hot rocks fume under the crater’s silica lake and release a salt gas that causes the liquid surface to swell into a dome of sparkling glass.

BIOGRAPHY: Prior to establishing her studio and school in North Carolina, she taught as Head of Ceramics at Moorhead State University, in Moorhead Minnesota. Ms. Rockriver received an MFA from Hunter College, a BFA from UNC-Chapel Hill, and has studied Glass and Ceramics at Penland and Corning. She has conducted seminars on the intersection of art and science and her work is internationally published, featuring this pioneering combination of science and art.