The Diver Sun

Catherine Rahn Beneath the Sea

By William Warmus

“In the midst of recent technology, where advances in computers and communication emphasize mind as they minimize the body, Catherine Rahn's use of technology, especially scuba gear and the modern glassmaker's array of firemaking instruments, is directed toward merging us with a greater body: the ocean, the web of nature.”

This essay was published in 1996 by Hodgell Gallery, Sarasota, Florida to accompany an exhibition of the work of Catherine Rahn, March 1-31, 1996.

Water and fire: opposites united as each day the sun dives below, and rises from, the ocean. Following the sun, artists of fire have since ancient times forged interpretations in glass of the riches of the ocean, "enamels and cameos from the sea" fashioned in terrestrial furnaces. Oceanic works in glass are all the more precious because the deep releases its secrets slowly, the sun a silent witness. Glassmakers from ancient Egypt and Rome to Galle, Tiffany and Chihuly have teased inspiration from fishermen's nets and deposits along the sea's edges, later through the reports of oceanographers and scuba divers. Now Catherine Rahn joins them, diving with the sun to harvest images and subjecting those images to the intense discipline of heat and light.

Catherine is back from Fiji, where during her last dive she "swam with a ten foot Manta Ray that stayed with us for fifteen minutes. I was very touched by its beauty, something that takes me away from myself and into nature. That is god - to me nature is god." In the midst of recent technology, where advances in computers and communication emphasize mind as they minimize the body, Catherine Rahn's use of technology, especially scuba gear and the modern glassmaker's array of firemaking instruments, is directed toward merging us with a greater body: the ocean, the web of nature. She has begun to coax from the sun its secrets of the sea.

This project takes some guts. As the pioneering diver, cinematographer, winner of five Emmy Awards and the "Man who loves sharks" Stan Waterman remarks, "I've made two trips to the South Pacific with Catherine. It took a lot of get up and go for her to dive in water with poisonous animals but she has the initiative and she loved what she saw underwater. There was much in the flowing forms and vivid colors to suggest an alliance between what she saw there and what she does in glass. Catherine's initial experiences were akin to what a few million divers have found. Underwater, beauty and danger are balancing. With an artistic sensitivity like Catherine's, the hazards are put aside by what is gentle and vibrant in the ocean's beauty, handsomer than any terrestrial garden."

Surrounded by the ocean's beauties and dangers, Catherine's project involves a meditation on the particulars of the deep, is all about focus and capture; "By concentrating closely you see the interior life on the reef. Creatures that are missed in the broad perspective become obvious -- maybe a minute nudibranch or a crystal clear shrimp. Occasionally the pattern is the camouflage. Like looking for love, the harder you look, the more elusive things become. If I stay in one spot and focus my mind, my eyes become macro lenses." Catherine tries to capture what she sees below the surface and put it into her glass. When working with a team of glassmakers she attends carefully to the manipulation of the surface of the hot glass, tools in hand, striving for the proper effect. One cubic foot of seafloor, intently observed; one cubic foot of glass and hands, carefully directed. The result of these meditations is to endow the work with a mystical aura that merges with the ocean's. Mystics have to do with mysteries, and mysteries excite curiosity, evoke worlds limited to a small group of initiates: the ocean's depths and the arcana of glassmaking are natural domains of the mystic. As Waterman says, the ocean's mystique is palpably present "and an artist who can express that is very facile indeed. It is such a physical thing: the silence of it and the large predators that are there. Catherine certainly gets the flow."

Although the undersea world is inhabited by predators, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur observes that "most of the evil in the world comes from violence among human beings." Catherine Rahn explores the ocean and brings its forms to life in glass, but they are refocused forms, inhabited by human struggles. She is impressed that "we ourselves are fluid" and is amazed that most people seem oblivious to this linkage with the ocean. The human forms in her work are always on the verge of merging with, or emerging from, watery worlds just as "water is inherently a dwelling for me." The rapture of the deep, the carefree movements of the glassmaker's "dance": these baptisms transform pieces where human figures first struggle atop, then are sheltered by, and finally merge into, mollusks and sea stars.

Rahn's work balances between caring and the carefree. She relishes the freedom diving provides while stressing that "We are not here to suck the earth dry, but to replenish as well. Let's have a commitment to give back." Her commitment has landed her in a hyperbaric chamber in Gainesville, Florida under treatment for the bends, followed by a fear of diving. Conquering that fear has sharpened her self confidence, centered her focus. Just as rock climbers, tethered to a strong rope, learn to relish their falls as a counterpart to a good ascent, divers feel that a good descent is heightened by submission to the mysteries of the deep, whether they include sharks or the dangers in ascending to the surface.

All of this purposefulness doesn't obscure what Waterman likes so much in Catherine, "her sense of humor. She's vibrant, alive." Artworks are first meant to provide pleasure, and this Rahn accomplishes. She is astonished by the recent work, as if an amazing sea creature nudged her from behind and presented her with a gift: "Out of a Sea Star came - Star Ray! They stand on their heads but have wings and undulate like a Ray. They are up in the air but rest on the table at the same time. I call them Star Rays." Rahn's seawork behaves like a gift dislodged from the deep, dripping with the details of a strange but wonderful world, the same world inhabited by the nursing whales observed in Moby Dick: "Some of the subtlest secrets of the seas seemed divulged to us in this enchanted pond. We saw young Leviathan amours in the deep. And thus, though surrounded by circle upon circle of consternation and affrights, did these inscrutable creatures at the center freely and fearlessly indulge in all peaceful concern-ments; yea, serenely reveled in dalliance and delight..." Catherine Rahn uses fire to capture the secrets of water, her work a soft, caring center in the midst of a world full of struggles.

William Warmus Ithaca, NY January, 1996

Note: "Enamels and cameos from the sea" is from Emile Galle, Ecrits pour L'Art, 1908. The title of this essay and the final quotation are from Herman Melville's Moby Dick. The citation from Paul Ricoeur is from Oneself as Another; 1992; Ricoeur develops the theme of caring and carefreeness in the chapter on "The Self and Narrative Identity." Catherine Rahn has studied glassmaking at the Pilchuck School, but produces her current work with a team of artist-glass-makers. The most recent team was composed of Curtiss Brock, Joni Kost, Jonathan Christie, Brent Cole, Marc Petrovic, James Mongrain