Elia Häberli

Elia Häberli – glass objects

Glass is a natural product and a development of civilization.

It is the material that Elia Häberli has chosen for her artistic work.

It is the contrasting nature of this material that fascinates

Elia Häberli, combinations such as fragility and wounding force,

the flowing and the unchangeable, transparency and opaque.

This opposition can be felt in almost all of her objects.

Her works show two sides, two ways of looking at it.

For her that is life. A smooth and a rough side. Together they form

one unity. Sometimes the one or the other side predominates.

Such contrasts are spirit and body, feeling and intellect,

emotionality and rationality, light and darkness, joy and mourning,

death and birth, all of which are very close to each other.

The meeting point of these two worlds in her objects can

only be guessed, felt or understood.

Hardly any other artistic raw material shows the process

of its creation in the finished object with such immediacy.

Elia Häberli’s glass objects are cast. In the casting process

there is a wide range for the artist to express herself in images.

In her most recent works Elia Häberli sensitizes the observer

above all for the creative process and the material itself by

using moulds made of sand. After the form has solidified,

traces of the sand stick to the sides of the object.

Elia Häberli leaves the «sandy memories» on the surface of her

sculptures. In doing this she indirectly refers to quartz sand,

an essential invisible element of glass itself, and makes the

observer aware of the working process.

Working with glass is a process for Elia Häberli. She experiments,

takes risks in trying things out, loves the single specimen in its

uniqueness and distinctiveness. In her glass objects she does not

search illusions, but strong expression and an abstract imagery.

She wants the observer to understand her analysis of the material

and of its losses that life causes in body and soul.

«Glass lives. It is original, unpredictable, becomes liquid,

can be formed and sets limits. These limits also show me my

personal limits. An intense confrontation between my possibilities

and those of glass develops. The way I treat it – it treats me.»

originality, ist unpredictability and the variety of forms.

For Elia Häberli glass is not dead matter. It has characteristics 

which bring her to the limits of her personal skills and knowledge

of the raw material. The artist is interested in making visible the

process, the struggle for form and flow of colour, the taming of

the material which nevertheless never loses its individuality.

Glass changes all the time; its state – liquid – becomes manifest

in areas of tension, in changes of surface and colour from shining

to dim or crystal clear to opaque states. Glass is never solid.

It surprises again and again, it changes the same way life changes.

While dealing and working with glass Elia Häberli has a good look

at life itself: the genesis of her sculptures is influenced by both

coincidence and foreseeing. Glass breaks and is torn when cooling

down; but even the solidified material lives on in its complexity

and the changeability of its light effects.

Elia Häberli’s glass objects fascinate in a mysterious way.

They convey tension and chaos, but also peace and balance.

They show aesthetic, softly formed sides as well as sharp edges

and impenetrable depths. They confuse you or touch you.

Both artist and observer have to accept them as they are.

A later change is hardly possible or – if endeavoured – only linked

with losses that leave traces and scars, similar to those.

Elia Häberli • Unterortstrasse 5 c • 8804 Au Zh • 044 451 17 24 • 079 756 16 85 • info(at)eliahaeberli.ch