with the way artisans in Japan and other Asian countries join materials together. They celebrate the spiritual connections that these craftsmen and women make with the mundane, and their ability to infuse useful, commonplace objects with functional beauty and abstract representations of nature.” It’s interesting to me, and relevant in looking at Leighton’s work over time, that he speaks very specifically about the way materials are connected. His elegant assemblage sculptures make use of cast and blown glass, wood, copper, and other materials, drawing a viewer’s eye to the places where distinct surfaces and references merge and overlap: hard and soft, East and West, practical and mystical. Leighton’s newest work, made with the same attention to detail, continues to draw on the Japanese inspiration but with an added emo- tional resonance borne of the artist’s consider- ation of personal history, including his Karate practice and his relationship to making art over time. Burden, 2014, consists of an organically shaped urn made from eighty-six layers of cut plywood glued and ground to a smooth finish and bearing a bent basswood pole with two smaller cast glass buckets attached on either side with copper, wood, and rope. Leighton recalls the story and object that, in part,
inspired this work, “My wife and I bought a beautiful Japanese antique wooden bucket on our honeymoon. The day we returned home with the bucket, my only brother was killed in a motorcycle accident. Today that bucket over-flows with the joy of our marriage and helps carry the burden of my loss.” Dualities such as these—joy and loss, beauty and utility, meticulous control and peaceful acceptance— run throughout Imperfect, Impermanent, and Incomplete, not as opposing forces, but as different aspects of a complex and harmonious whole.
CHOPPING WOOD, CARRYING WATER: JOHN LEIGHTON’S FORWARD STANCE
What still stands out to me most clearly from a visit to Thailand over a decade ago is a mod- est cafe where I enjoyed a simple meal; from the taste of the food to the temperature of the room and the color of the walls, the whole experience was infused with a calm peaceful- ness, as if each element were calibrated to coalesce in a harmonious whole. To most, this might seem an odd thing to remember, but I sense that John Leighton would understand perfectly; it is a similar kind of harmony— blending the quotidian and the sublime, the manmade and the natural, the visual and the tactile—that inspires Leighton, and that his own work has come to embody. Leighton took his first trip to Japan in 1983 when invited to teach at the Tokyo Glass Insti- tute and he has returned 4 times since, most recently to Western Japan where he taught at Osaka University of Arts in the summer of 2009. Since that first visit, he has been fasci- nated by the way so many Japanese objects, from ancient shrines to contemporary man- hole covers, are made with deep attention to aesthetics, detail, and craftsmanship. In 2010, John told The GLASS Quarterly Hot Sheet that his works, “reference my 25-year fascination
—Annie Buckley
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