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(Translated from the French by Robert Page)

Mexican artist Ana Thiel's process of patient investigation, careful contemplation, and photographic documentation culminates in her sculptural installations, which can be seen as an inquiry into lost history, forgotten textures, and the vanished traces of a changing human and natural landscape. The closely observed, authentic details that she then casts in glass offer clues to an alternative, earlier sense of "place," of naturally occurring or man-made hollows that can be rendered in glass, to haunting and powerful effect. Thiel's cast elements become a part of her larger sculptural "vocabulary," which she assembles in installations that become an imagined landscape based on authentic physical details employed to create something absolutely new.

Thiel's first exhibition in France took place in the summer of 2008 at the Musee du Verre in Sars-Poteries, a three-hour drive north of Paris. The museum and workshop, located in the small mountain town of Avesnois, has been showing contemporary glass and offering workshops since 1994, building on the town's historic connection to glassmaking.

Theil arrived in September 2007 to begin her residency and set out to develop further the demanding technique of direct sandcasting. The resulting sculptures were exhibited together with photographs that traced the evolution of Theil's vision of the Avesnois region, for which she took many photos and collaborated with Paul Louis, the house photographer of Sars-Poteries, to capture on film the evolution of her observations and understanding.

Before beginning any new work, Thiel takes time to immerse herself in the place where she is. When she has come to understand its secret stories, legends, or myths, she allows the natural environment to speak to her as she takes long walks with her senses alert. It is details that capture her attention--a fissure, a drip, a trace of fire, rusty or worn-out, long-forgotten objects with patinas--each element becomes a clue or piece of evidence, each methodically classified as if part of a crime scene. In Thiel's case, the crime is nothing as obvious as a robbery. For this artist, the crime would be in not noticing a beautiful natural detail such as the hollow in a massive twisted tree trunk which becomes a relic of an experience and an element in her artword.

Once these elements are identified, Thiel changes from detective to forensic specialist and begins the task of collecting the samples that will be used in her casting process. As if dusting for history's fingerprints, the artist makes an imprint, in fact a precise husk (skin) of alginate, and then takes her collected imprint back to the studio. At other times she will bring back the actual object in order to make a direct cast. Nothing stops her: if it is a small crack in a block of several tons that she wants to capture, the slight, delicate Thiel will use her impressive powers of organization to mobilize a truck and a team of men with strong arms to carry the boulder back home.

It is at this point that glass enters the picture. The artist has chosen sandcasting, a basic technique that is actually complicated and physically demanding. It involves pouring molten glass onto moist sand. Ana sculpts in negative her future work and then sprinkles the compacted sand with colored frit or pigments. Using a large metal ladle, the crew scoops molten glass from the furnace and spreads it slowly into the mold. Finally, the piece is extracted from the mold and is re-fired. This simple process actually requires great precision. The sand's composition must be adapted to the nature and the temperature of the glass. At Sars-Poteries the team has decided on a mixture of bentonite (a clay) and olivine (a mineral). Its hygrometric level is excellent. "I chose this technique," says Ana, "because it is both crude and delicate. We could play at making sand castles, like at the beach, but sandcasting really demands rigorous artistic control."

Around Sars-Poteries, Ana has carefully chosen several sites whose origins are shrouded in mystery. These places do not show up in tourist guides but are deeply engraved in the collective memory of the inhabitants. The series entitled "Source" tells of the disappearance of the statue of St. Eloi that decorated a 17th-century fountain in the village center of Floursies. It was not a matter of re-creating the work but rather of interpreting its imprint by passing it through several imaginary interpretations.

Flight and Freedom (all works 2007) are the result of falling in love with an ancient stone open-air theater nestled in the wild near Lez-Fontaine. The casting of a gap in the joint of two stone steps is changed into the flight of a glass bird. The freedom of words and expression floats symbolically over a place devoted to living, popular spectacles, which have been replaced today by the banalities of television.

Summit was inspired by a tree near the studio marked by a wound inflicted by a barbed wire that encircled the trunk and sank into its flesh. In a natural hollow of the trunk Ana inserted her sculpture, showing a vertical mouth screaming in despair. A clear message: in this time of ecological crisis we will best protect nature if we listen carefully to it, because we are an integral part of it. Finally, From the Depths, From Within, and Inner Source refer to recurrent themes in Ana Thiel's work: the stone, a symbol of solidity, and the hand, which, according to Ana, "makes man human."

Ana's attraction to the symbolic reading of "orphaned" objects comes no doubt from the Mexican landscapes that surround her studio in San Miguel de Allende, in what was formerly a henhouse. The climate, which is very dry in summer and wet in winter, the semi-arid vegetation, and the rural environment make up her primary source of inspiration. "I appreciate the details that arise from immense arid landscapes," she says, "like a solitary palm tree, the crystalline composition of cactus drowned in the desert snow." She works alone, lighting the furnace two times a year, when she invites apprentices and other artists to participate in the work. The rest of the time Ana travels, incessantly capturing new sensations, such as her discovery of the russet autumn foliage in the north of France: "We don't have that in our climate," she remarks, "it's surprising to see."

Ana Thiel exalts glass as a binder cementing together epochs and cultures. It incarnates transparency and honesty. This methodical process is neither a "reconstitution" nor an art of "reclamation." Once the work is completed, it exists as itself and is freed from its reference.

The whole process is thus a ritual intended to obscure its origins, a "making" that invites us, in fact, to distance ourselves from reality. To read into the signs, to interpret and then to make use of the imaginary, of doubt, and of interpretation in confronting the "verifiable" premises of industrial economy. One of Ana Thiel's works, shown at the Galerie Internationale du Verre in Biot in 2004, is built around an old book in which a glass sphere is embedded in a state of destructive fusion. The work is a way of expressing the disappearance of Amerindian cultures, but also treats the universal theme of censorship.

To reinforce a conceptual reading, the artist organizes her creative process like a police investigation for which the pieces of evidence are carefully collected and classified. Nothing is more serious than the imaginary.

Since 1995 the artist has been using glass as a major element in her sculpture. An elegant young woman, the daughter of a Swedish father and a Mexican mother, she combines the Scandinavian spirit of exploration with Central American tenacity and attachment to roots. After studying industrial design at the Ibero-American University of Mexico, Ana Thiel discovered glass during a conference on semi-industrial glassblowing. Having won the "Best Mexican Student Award," she decided to attend the Pilchuck School in the United States in order to deepen her knowledge of the subject. Her first teachers of glass arts were Bertil Vallien, James Carpenter, and Dan Dailey, followed by Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova. Thus, she went from glassblowing to casting.

After a visit to Murano, she devoted herself to sculpture and was granted a commission in 1987 by the prestigious Corning Museum of Glass in New York. Her homeland has not forgotten her: she was awarded first prize at the Biennial of Glass Arts in Monterey, Mexico. "In my country," the artist says, "glass is not a discipline separate from traditional art. I often visit artists of other disciplines and invite them naturally to come attempt this material in my studio."

But that humanism and empathy are not the only motivations for Ana's work. The attentive observer of her works will read another book in their glass pages, that of her life. Burnings and blazes show up in the sculptures beginning in 2000, the year her father died. Today she claims to be living in a period that is "more positive, a moment of fullness." Flights of colorful birds, transparent columns rising to the sky, messages of hope expressed through the predominance of glass: "It gives light and life to dark objects and materials," she says. "I stopped asking myself questions; my sculptures are part of everything, of human relationships."