Carol Milne’s work will fool you on first reading; its muscular nature must be excavated from its sugary shell. Colorful loops and lines of translucent glass betray the physically intensive and highly technical nature of the work. Process is predominant in the artist’s work, but instead of flinging paint or bending metal, the artist creates complex structures with an ingenious fiber-inspired process.

Carol’s sculptures are grounded in the early revelation that big structures can be built with fine fibers using the grid-like interlocking loops that the knitting process produces. Carol has leveraged this foundational insight by fantastically mapping forms in space with the translucent and colored amorphous solid known as glass. Mimicking the knitting process with wax rope, Carol builds forms that are then slathered with layer upon layer of plaster to build up massive molds into which molten glass is then poured. Once cooled, the fine, lattice-like sculptures embedded within the shapeless pile of plaster must then be painstakingly chipped and scraped free of their encasement, using precision hand-held tools as fine as a dentist’s. These large, fragile, and heavy plaster-coated masses must be gently maneuvered throughout the process to expose the luminescent ligaments of glass buried within. Carol’s work represents the refinement of a rudimentary glass process used by the Egyptians over 3,000 years ago, and the refinement she has achieved astounds for its spectacular physical mastery.

Once pulled from the plaster, the artist’s final forms, their twisted and coiled, figurative and abstract shapes, reference and honor the cultural relevance of the knitting process itself. Of equal importance, they also revel in the outrageous delight of their seeming miraculous materiality; they dance and leap, they spin and flow. This unquiet embrace of exuberant positivity does nothing to suppress the solemn seriousness of the artist’s skill and, indeed, is central to the celebratory nature of the work and its felicitous accomplishment. Carol invites you to admire skill and to take pleasure in the beauty she produces with her magical manipulation of matter. And when you do that, laugh, in a deeply satisfying, existential way, for you have found pleasure in process