Heart of Glass / Or: Why Mia Lerssi is the Dancing Queen of Glass Art by Lise Haller Baggesen published in Kunstuff

Heart of Glass

Or: Why Mia Lerssi is the Dancing Queen of Glass Art

By Lise Haller Baggesen, 2008

Picture this: Debbie Harry in a pair of tiny glass slippers, seductively swaying on the ooh-ooh aah-aah of Blondie’s monster hit Heart of Glass… Like a modern-day Cinderella, she is dancing the night away, surrounded by her army of black knights – like, as if she gives a toss who is going to follow her home. Glass stilettos is a killer look – it is in fact the killer look when you think about it, and this knowledge more than compensates for the pain and suffering involved – even if you have to chop off a heel or cut off a toe.  

I don’t know if Mia Lerssi ever saw this video, but somehow I think this must be the woman she had in mind when she thought up her Piece Cinderella is a Slut: an old shoe stand from a shop window, a found object, dipped in chrome and polished up, but not a single glass slipper left. ‘She spent them all, and now she’s alone,’ Mia explains to me, as she talks me through the works she’s preparing for her upcoming Solo-show –her first- in Gallery D&K in Copenhagen, aptly opening on Valentine’s day.

Like all the other objects in the show, the shoe stand is a token of a relationship gone wrong. The exhibition reads like a crime scene, and like detectives we are trying to fit the pieces together, to make up the story as we go along.

What, for instance, should we make of the three deflated glass balloons engraved with the words ‘idiots’, ‘lovers’ & ‘caramels’? Not to mention the nose-droppings: over-sized clown’s noses, lined with red glitter. I think we can safely say that the party’s over and we’re facing the morning after.

Is an upside down YES really a big ‘NO’, or is it more like a ‘Maybe’, a ‘whatever’ or an ‘If You Say So’? The denim covering the giant letters hints at a hippie sensibility, but it could also be a childhood memory, as faded as the ballpoint customized jeans we wore, way back when the spotted youths who had yet to become our former lovers were assembling in tree huts, to worship pop magazine centre folds of you-know-who.

Still, there is no air of nostalgia here; rather the atmosphere is clinical, and definitely present day. It is as if Mia is dissecting the language of love, all the clichés, to get a change to hold it out at arm’s length, to study it for what it’s worth. The slogans and untitled objects and in the show stand out as pure form, cleaned of the usual connotations, and more often than not, devoid of colour also. 

Cunt, Cunnilingus, Cum:  sexual slang, written in fluid glass calligraphy. It is amazing that these objects are solid, because they seem to come dripping of the wall, like pools of tears or sperm. Like with Mia’s heart shaped glass butts, the attractiveness of these works is ambiguous. The craftsmanship and the playfulness with which they are executed, exploits the fetish value of the shiny candy-like material for all it’s worth, while at the same time, that very material embodies the fragility of her subject matter. There is a certain synesthetic quality to Mia’s works –when I look at her butts, my ears resonate with the syncopated drumbeats and pounding fretless bass-lines of late seventies disco. Or, maybe it’s just because the butts resemble that original fetish: the mirror-ball, all shiny exterior surrounding a heart of darkness.

Mia tells me about another work she’s preparing for the exhibition: the four legs of what was once a proud stallion are now being cast in glass. The making of this piece has not been easy; she’s telling me the story about how she lugged the four disembodied limbs with her from the butcher on an early morning train, and she is showing me the pictures of her washing the legs, hooves and all, and preparing them for making the wax mould. Because of the sheer size of these objects, the first attempt at casting them has failed, and she’s now working out another way of finishing this monumental piece. In the gallery the four parts will be scattered on the floor, and from the position of the legs, the way they froze into their current pose, we can still make out how they must have given way under his enormous weight as he was shot dead. They will be accompanied by a small portrait of a horse’s head, the kind of little relief that you see in teenage girls room, also cast in clear glass.  Of course this is a less than subtle hint at the fairy-tale prince on his white stallion and if you put that together with another object in the exhibition – a white flag of surrender, executed in traditional Greenland bead technique – you could almost be led to believe that love is a battle field. In Mia’s universe though, it’s more like an elephant in a china shop, and we end up hurting each other, not for gain or out of spite, but just because of who we are and what we carry with us.

‘Yes, says Mia, it’s about love – but it’s also about freedom. The problem is; can you have both at the same time?’ She continues: ‘I’m making this enormous dream-catcher; it’s as big as a hula-hoop, and covered in silver beads. I’ve got really mixed feelings about dream-catchers, because on one hand, they annoy me, but at the same time I find them irresistible.’ To me, this object becomes almost symbolic of the duality of love and freedom, is it achievable or is it just a beautiful dream?

It’s a delicate balance, yes, but if you fall apart at the seams and start to unravel, I’m sure the Cuckoo Box could come in handy.  With its white leather exterior it looks like a designer it-bag, but there is more to it than meets the eye. Where on a ladies handbag you’d normally find the snap lock there is a hole the size of a turtleneck. Mia explains: ‘It’s a mobile padded cell -a private sphere in the shape of a bag, to put your head in, when you need to freak out!’ The interior is gorgeous, satin soft and padded in a French upholstering technique called captions. It’s a technique, which is normally associated with Chesterfield armchairs and chaise longs, and it is, in Mia’s own words, both pretentious and bourgeois. It is also undeniably luxurious and the whole object seems to signal: ‘this is where you can loose your marbles in dignity and style!’ It comes with a warning though: a white neon sign reading ‘this bag is not a TOY’. It’s a disclaimer commonly found on plastic bags and wrappings, but, it also echoes a sharp ‘Don’t mess with me!’ Another neon sign, this time with the Slogan ‘DIY or die,’ is reminder that if you don’t learn to love yourself, or at least to forgive yourself, (or if you fail at that at least to just grin and bear it) nobody else will.

So what is the moral to this tale? Is Mia Lerssi just a once bitten, twice shy cynic, declaring ‘Death to all Romance’? No, I think that would be too easy, but before I reach my conclusion, let me once more return to the 1979 video clip for Blondie’s ‘Heart of Glass’. The clip starts and ends with a night view of the Manhattan skyline, lovingly circling around the majestic double phallus of the twin towers, all shiny polished glass and steel. Now, we all know what happened later, but, just like the end of a love affair can be a disaster on a personal level, that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t beautiful for as long as it lasted, even if it was doomed to end in tears.