ABSTRACT
Geoffrey Mann's output manages to be both richly varied and precisely focused, reflective of his natural curiosity about the world in general, and his passionate dedication to the possibilities of a few materials in particular, principally glass, porcelain and bronze. Casting exposes the liveliness of a material that is often seen as static and crystalline, even abstract. In the annealing process, the artisan carefully heats and cools a work in glass to ease internal stresses and thus strengthen it, delicately handling the material in a precarious state between solid and liquid, what Mann calls an ‘amorphous solid'. Architectural historian Antoine Picon has defined materiality as the ‘relationship that humans have at a given moment in history, and in a given society, with the physical world'. The work imagines an empathetic regime of materiality in which objects are viewed as seamless extensions of their beholders' affects.
