National Glass Centre

The Glass Delusion

21 May - 3 October 2010

‘The Glass Delusion’ was the name given in the late Middle Ages and Baroque times to a form of depression. Sufferers were obsessive, compulsive, driven by irrational fears, and imagined themselves to be made of glass, hence brittle and fragile. So pervasive was the condition that it entered world literature, philosophy and history. Cervantes wrote the novel The Glass Licentiate, Descartes mentions it as a premise to his syllogism I think therefore I am, and Charles VI of France had iron ribs sewn into his clothes to protect himself from breaking. Victims allegedly travelled padded in straw and refused to sit down fearing their body weight would fracture their buttocks.

The syndrome evokes a psychological separation between reality and imagination, between a strength and a vulnerability that we all experience at times. Glass is a barrier, yet allows light to pass through it; it magnifies and shrinks; it can be delicate as well as deadly. Its attributes are appropriated in symbolic ways: the Glass Brain and the Glass Man; mirror image, alter ego, Doppelganger, and split personality all come to mind. More than any other material glass has the ability to combine opposites and it is this duality that is the inspiration for this exhibition.