Exhibition | ECOTONES: STATES OF PROXIMITY
Updated: 9 minutes ago
April 24th to May 22nd, 2026
Exhibition view.. Photography: Bruno Lopes
SOLO EXHIBITION:
Maria Renée Morales Lam
TEXT:
Matt Finch
A crisis breaks like an ocean wave, accumulating force then coming upon us abruptly. So easily does it catch us by surprise. The economist Rüdiger Dornbuschformulated a law: crises happen little by little, then all at once; they take longer than you think to arrive, then happen faster than you expected, so you have thechance to be wrong twice.
Yet the short life of a wave is an illusion.
As George Lipsitz writes,
In places where the ocean meets the beach, most waves rise, crest, and fall in the space of a few yards. They are visible to the eye for only a few seconds.
The life of a wave seems to be short, both spatially and temporally. Yet these waves can have enormous power. Under the right circumstances, they can erode rocky coastlines, pull sand from the shore back out to sea, crash through windows and walls to destroy buildings, and even wash up on shore miles inland.
Lipsitz reminds us that, though waves appear abruptly when they break, they have accumulated shape and power from prevailing winds and undersea currentsacross their “long fetch” – the distance of travel between a wave’s point of origin and its point of arrival.
“An eruption of hatred, an outbreak of violence, or the overthrowing of an entire social order can shock us by its surprising force and fury, but the surprise comes largely because its long fetch remains hidden from view,” Lipsitz continues.
In times of turbulence and uncertainty, we may look backwards and perceive the Dynamics which gave rise to present circumstances, overcoming our sense ofsurprise and re-evaluating our understanding of the here-and-now.
For Lipsitz,
The purpose of studying history is to train ourselves to look for its fetch, to realise that things that appear suddenly in our lives have a past, and to appreciatethat part of what things are is how they came to be. Historical knowledge reveals that events that we perceive as immediate and proximate have causes and consequences that span great distances.
María Renée Morales Lam’s work has long concerned itself with unseen forces and past dynamics that make themselves visible and palpable in moments ofencounter and contact. The concept of the ecotone, which lends its name to this exhibition, describes regions of transition between ecological communities - including tidal areas, estuaries, and the riparian zones which mark the edges of rivers, streams, and lakes against the land. In each of these places, materials - andlife itself - may flow and exchange in valuable ways.
Here, we are invited to the meeting point of the everyday world and an artspace in which Morales Lam’s principal medium, glass, toys with our perceptions ofmaterial properties. Her work has been influenced from the beginning by the interaction of energy and matter, and all the consequent phenomena arisingtherefrom.
Glassworking is also an art of crisis, in the sense that its practitioners face difficulty and danger, working under pressure of time as the material relentlessly coolsand even the tools which shape the glass grow, eventually, too hot to handle. Morales Lam’s recent experience as a factory glassworker deepens this awareness ofthe conditions and limitations within which this art is frequently practised, and the sense of glasswork itself as an ecotone where art, craft, and industrial production meet.
As an art material, glass tests our ability to envision a desired outcome and exercise our agency. Though our expectations may grow faster than our skills, we set out with the plan to create a certain form; the particular quantity of glass that is gathered on our pipe behaves in its own idiosyncratic way; and our owninterventions affect the glass from the outset, as the material remembers each breath, each touch and turn, and, ever cooling, resists erasure of our mistakes as much as our intentions.
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The word crisis has its origins in an ancient Greek word meaning “decision”, and was used to signify the turning point of a disease, when the patient’s journeymight direct itself towards recovery as well as misfortune.
Glassworking, too, has a curative element, in that mistakes and mishaps are inevitable, yet the true talent of the glassworker lies in the ability to remedy and healanything which goes awry, even and especially though the glass itself will not forget. As the glassblower’s mantra goes, “It’s not what you make, it’s what yousave.”
The artist’s work invites us to join a dance of proximity and contact in the face of crisis. Forces travelling across time and space reach us. The turbulence of life’socean arrives as a breaking wave, but it need not overwhelm.
This exhibition is an invitation - though not an obligation - to turn towards recovery, solace, and care. By taking the role of visitor, we become entwined in relationships - with the artwork, the artist, the space . However lightly we tread, however little we engage, a tie is formed. Bruno Latour notes that
Strength does not come from concentration, purity, and unity, but from dissemination, heterogeneity, and the careful plaiting of weak ties ... resistance, obduracy, and sturdiness is more easily achieved through netting, lacing, weaving, twisting, of ties that are weak by themselves.
We may choose how strongly we embrace and are embraced by the artist’s vision, by the effects of the material itself, the thoughts and feelings which are conjuredin the moment of encounter, within ourselves or others. Hope and solace arise, in Morales Lam’s work, because something unseen is made manifest, calls out to us, invites us to connect and bond even in turbulent times.
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