Part of series of glass sculptures "collection of collapsed hearts"

Deliberately broken, imperfect and collapsed shape, still reminding very much of a heart - the most essential life organ and one of the most reproduced and trite symbol.

My aim is to bring uncomfortable and complex associations, play with symbolic meanings of the heart and its real appearance.
I wanted to make the sculptures resemble hearts but not copy them.
For this reason I made them black and white, to relate the shape to a traditional way of making sculptures from marble or other monochrome stone.

Glass by its controversial qualities of being fragile, broken and durable, hot, alive and cold, stone like and dead, express in my opinion very well this idea and relation between life and death, uniqueness and cliché which the heart as a symbol bears.

I was inspired by anatomic wax models made in Florence in the 16th century, which I first saw and drew at the Josephinium museum in Vienna. Dramatic casting of real human body parts made from such an unendurable material as wax - realistic and colourful painted preserved for 500 years old.
Somehow the most fragile things can be the most durable!

I also made precise study drawings of real pigs’ hearts which are the closest to human. I took from a butcher’s shop in Copenhagen -”The pork meat market of Europe”.
It is important to me to have a very in depth knowledge of my subject matter but I have no intentions just to reproduce anatomically correct hearts in glass.