Glass Ceiling

Silo Park, Auckland NZ — 2019

Beneath the cavernous ceiling of a disused Silo, 16.5 tonnes of smashed glass push against castle-thick concrete walls. Hand-carved into deep undulating curves, this glacier-worn landscape comprises millions of crystal shards. Fractured light and shadows animate the depths, a turbulent pool with rises and hollows, peaks and troughs. From a high vantage point, these surface incursions form the impressions of multiple bodies which have fallen into the cut-glass bed. Pulsing with sensory meaning, Glass Ceiling offers a space for personal and collective experiences and memories amidst a sea of systemic constraints.

Evoking a metaphoric glass ceiling – an invisible yet systemic barrier to women's and marginalised peoples' ascent in economic and public life – the glittering space entices yet entry is forbidden. In an intoxicating push and pull of fear and desire, beauty competes with the sublime. Shattered and shimmering, the 'ceiling' is a disc with glass panes at arched doors, providing thresholds and windows to an operating system within. Each shard becomes discernable with endless diversity in colour and shape, millions of individual memories in crystallised form. The sense of precarity and awe is heightened by the industrial scale of the monument, looking up inside the tower a yawning darkness looms overhead. Potent political metaphors come to the fore as global glass ceilings are shattered and silo-ed – seditious acts that serve to liberate yet reveal circularity and obstructions anew.