Breath

250 hand-made glass vials each containing a single breath, plywood | 2012

installation dimensions variable

Clear, recurring themes have emerged in Hempstead’s art practice, most notably an engagement with ideas of the body and its ephemeral and temporal boundaries. During her Masters of Fine Arts degree Hempstead focused on non-gendered, involuntary actions of the body, specifically the breath. As a breath connects to a universal human condition and experience, yet remains often forgotten and detached from significance. 

Hempstead handmade 250 hand blown glass vials, each one connecting to a moment in time, a savoured breath, which was stoppered and held in an infinite moment. From here, she created numerous sculptures exhibiting these vials in varied states. Yet, as the glass pieces were so fragile, each one would inevitably burst within a short period of time. This was due to the breath creating an air pressure vacuum within the glass vial, which the blown glass cannot withstand. To honour this poetic end to each vial, Hempstead purposefully destroyed each one after the sculptures had been completed. In the performance, she recorded both the visuals and the sound, but ultimately the sound recording became the most influential. The shattering of each vial mimicked the rhythmic pattern of a breath.  

Once the glass vials were broken, Hempstead collected the shards and glass remnants and proceeded to melt them back down to a solid cube form. For her, the solidity of the final object, symbolised a tombstone. All of the glass vials having now arrived back at their initial point of departure, but with the traces of time past and the markings of her hands. 

The glass represents all that opposes what it is containing: stability, a controlled pause in time, order, permanence and solidity. In doing so, these sculptures reference the body, but rather through its absence; in divorcing the primary significance of the body’s presence as well as gender, value and form. The formless breath is used as a tool to analyse the corporeal, transient and ephemeral rhythms of the body.