ROMONT.- In the exhibition Baldwin Guggisberg – Into the Labyrinth: A Liminal Journey, Philip Baldwin (1947) and Monica Guggisberg (1955), explore the theme of the labyrinth. Their interest in history ancient times, the wanderings of humanity and the reciprocal relationships between form, function, beauty aesthetics and symbolic meaning of the objects illustrates the artists' unique point of view on the thousand-year-old civilizations. The exhibition highlights current artistic trends and presents works from the most recent creative period of Baldwin & Guggisberg as well as glass installations specially designed for the exhibition at the Vitromusée Romont. Their presentation in two historic rooms of the Château de Romont takes visitors into a liminal journey which makes them realize that human existence very often takes labyrinthine paths.

Artists Statement:

“Nearly forty-two years ago, on August 8th, 1981, (the same day Roger Federer was born!), we crossed the border into Switzerland, having left Sweden in our old Saab V4 (Sweden's equivalent of the VW Beetle), and began our search for a place to set up our glassblowing studio. Over a period of three months and more than 10,000 kilometers of driving over hill and dale in the north of Vaud and many parts of Fribourg, we were on the brink of losing our nerve. Then we discovered Nonfoux, a small hamlet of seventy souls, part of the village of Essertines-sur-Yverdon. We remained there for twenty years. Not even thirty kilometers distant was the town of Romont, whose new stained-glass museum began in the same year we arrived.

Flash forward forty-two years, and we find ourselves pleased and delighted to return to this beautiful place. Our personal friendship with the museum began many years later, in 2014, when Stefan Trümpler invited us to participate in an exhibition. Subsequently, the Mobile A Bird on a Wing, followed by the nine-meter boat The Long Voyage, which had been specifically created for the Ariana Museum show in 2011, joined the collection in Romont after nearly ten years of peregrinations through Europe. The experience of doing this exhibition here, now, feels like a homecoming.

When a young indigenous male reaches adolescence, the tribal elders choose the right moment for initiation into manhood. Girls travel a different route to womanhood, also marked by celebration and initiation, in many ways both more pronounced and profound. In both cases a dramatic transition occurs, from childhood to adulthood. In the Nootka tribe, when young women first menstruated and celebrated that evolution in their bodies, they were taken far out to sea and left to swim back to shore unaided. The male initiation process could last several weeks and involve serious hardship, with painful episodes bordering on near-death experiences and extreme hunger deprivation. This transition, from childhood to womanhood and manhood, is a journey - a liminal journey - from one way of being to another. "Liminal", a fairly obscure word, not frequently heard in daily usage, captures this transitional moment. It's neither here nor there, but in between. When you are at the airport, in the taxi, in mid-flight, those situations may be seen as a microcosm of liminality. Indeed, the voyage from your home to your destination in total may be considered liminal. And finally, one's birth to one's death is the ultimate liminal experience.

This state of liminality is invariably and inexorably labyrinthine. There's only one way in, and one way out, albeit with many twists and turns. One need not read Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, or Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude to understand these things. A reflective peek in the mirror should do the trick, while Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, or C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles might offer even more evocative hints of liminal potential.

In preparing this exhibition we wanted to share the labyrinthine quality of our own work, with its diverse and varying themes, as well as to express the deeper connections we have made, especially over the last six or seven years, since we moved to Wales. In this time there have been four major exhibitions, all site specific, in St. Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh, Canterbury Cathedral, in Kent, England, Ebeltoft Glass Museum, Denmark, and the Musée du Verre in Conches, France. They have all addressed subjects both challenging and intimate, contemporary and ancient, from the twentieth century, back through humanity's long trajectory across history, from the paleolithic to the age of AI, together with our abiding links to the Cosmos.

Each of these previous exhibitions is represented here in Romont, with iconic installations from those shows. Represented as well are many examples of our ongoing smaller works over the last years. Many of these have been made expressly for Romont, and all are recent. All the work is being seen in Switzerland for the first time. For those viewers who knew us "way back when" in the last century, the works will give a clear sense of the long and liminal journey we have travelled.

The viewer is encouraged to imagine she is walking through a Labyrinth. The second, slightly smaller room, is devoted to four panels, with one free standing piece, The Peoples Wall, originally shown at Canterbury Cathedral. Three of the panels comprise two new installations, The Pleiades and the two-part The Rational and the Intuitive.

The Pleiades is in honor of a rather obscure constellation of stars which appears in the night sky as a small cluster. Seven stars, now likely only six, which for thousands of years have been known to civilizations around the world through antiquity and well beyond, as the Seven Sisters. Why humanity, with unerring ubiquity, has maintained such a consistent involvement with this cluster is the subject of mystery and conjecture, repeatedly recorded in literature and myth. How is it possible that people tens of thousands of years ago were capable of recognizing and recording the Sisters’ progression through the night sky? How indeed.

The paired panels The Rational and the Intuitive address the phenomena of our very own “noodle” (slang for “brain”). Much ink has been spilled on this subject. At its simplest level, our brain has two hemispheres, left and right. It is alleged that the left occupies itself with rational issues: this or that, two plus two equals four. And the right hemisphere is inclined toward intuition, emotion, imagination, and creativity. Lawyers and bankers to the left, you might think, artists and musicians to the right. But how silly is that? An investment banker without intuition? An artist without a firm grounding in the technology of her métier? A musician without finely tuned instruments? The idea is absurd. Recent research tends to imagine a complex crossover between these two hemispheres, a shared complicity in a beautiful totality. And doesn’t history suggest this should be the case? Think of the Pyramids, think of Gothic cathedrals. Yet today, in 2023, these two halves appear seriously out of balance, with the rational part holding all the cards, and the intuitive obliged to follow as a dog on a leash – if even it is invited to take part in the journey at all. AI is not going to help. We are out of balance as a species, out of synch with our own, best, intuitive instincts. And that’s why this sculpture is included in this exhibition. It is a cry for help, in a rapidly expanding wilderness.”

Philip Baldwin and Monica Guggisberg

Philip Baldwin (born in 1947 in New York) and Monica Guggisberg (born in 1955 in Bern) form an artistic duo since 1979. They met in Sweden where they spent two years working for the association of Wilke Adolfsson and Ann Wolff (formerly Wärff), learning the basics of glass craftsmanship, art and design. They opened their first workshop in Nonfoux, Switzerland, where they stayed for twenty years before moving to Paris and, in 2015, in the Welsh countryside. After starting their career making glasses, they gradually turned to the world of design, working with iconic companies such as Rosenthal, Steuben and Venini. Collaborations in design, however, represented only a small part of the work of Baldwin & Guggisberg, and over the past decade they have focused on larger-scale work. Their artistic works became consciously more allusive and more politically engaged, playing with the 5000 years of history of the glass material and its roots in past civilizations. In 2018 they were invited to place a series of installations at Canterbury Cathedral (“Under an Equal Sky”), beginning a dialogue with our time that they continue to explore even today. They exhibit all over the world and have received numerous awards, including the prestigious Prix de la Vocation in Lausanne, Switzerland.