The Music of the Spheres

Mark Matthews has been making marbles for 35 years. Somethe banded lutzes and opaques, the latticino and solid and vane cores, the clambroths, onionskins, and peppermintsacknowledge their nineteenth century roots. Othersthe precision air traps, the filigranas, the graalsemploy techniques never before used in the making of marbles. Matthews makes marblesspherical glass objects, to be sure, but glass spheres invested with a meaning, a significance, an aesthetic vision and purpose. In this sense, the marble is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Aestheticsissues of form and color theorycombine with investigations into the physical and chemical properties of glass, which, in turn, engage social history and economic concerns, and all in the unlikely form of the marble, a crystalline sphere which, in Matthews hands, produces its own kind of music.