THE QUARTERLY
[ CONVERSATION ]
A slow correspondence on seeing
Welcome
Hello...
The image above is one I created from JavaScript that mapped my mouse movements as I worked on the computer while chatting online.
We all do it.
I thought it would be a good icebreaker, since I don't know who is reading this, where you are now or what you do.
So, after an age of procrastination, this is my first newsletter. I plan to do this on a quarterly basis, and yes, there may be links to new works that I have made and to my art website, with one or two 'Echoes' about related themes a couple of times between issues.
Mainly though, it's about me letting the world know how I think, what I think about and taking the time to slow down and have a conversation, albeit virtual, about things I think are worth chatting about.
So without further ado, let's have a long chat about some stuff.
Kind Regards, Stephen.
Street Reflections No. 4 (2021) by Stephen Lambeth.
Some Ideas About Glass
Glass fascinates me. From its reflectivity and transparency to its ability to transcend time. Some of the oldest artifacts I own are Roman glass fragments. For nearly 900 years, Chartres Cathedral has glowed with a blue no modern lab can perfectly reproduce. Known as Chartres Blue, this stained glass was created using a lost medieval process involving cobalt, mineral ratios, and precise furnace control and the glass shimmers like liquid sapphires. Scientists understand the ingredients, but not the exact method. It’s a reminder that not all progress moves forward.
It shields and protects while letting us view the world. It provides a sense of wonder when light strikes at just the right angle, casting rainbows on the surfaces it protects. All this from grains of sand. Yet for all its apparent stability, glass moves. If you look at the stained glass windows of Cathedrals, the glass is thicker at the bottom because gravity pulls it down due to its vitreous nature.
As John Mauro, a materials scientist at Penn State, notes in an interview for Live Science,
"It's neither a true liquid nor a true solid — it has properties of both, but it's its own distinct state of matter.... The technical definition is that glass is a nonequilibrium, noncrystalline state of matter that appears solid on a short timescale but continuously relaxes towards the liquid state."
I find this amazing, and for this reason, I thought 'Glass" was a good place to start for 'The Quarterly Conversation'
To start off, I thought I'd introduce photographic works about glass and a photographer who was innovative in how they utilised glass in their images. Jessica Eaton's latest works from her series 'Time on a Bottle' are just stunning. The conceptual thinking behind all her works is brilliant.
Natura Morta (Luce Danzante) 42, (2022) by Jessica Eaton.
The other artist is Saul Leiter, and his work is very poetic. I would be honoured to be half as talented as he was in shooting and capturing the world around him. Leiter's work significantly impacted the field of photography by pioneering the use of colour in a medium that was predominantly black-and-white at the time, influencing future generations of photographers. His unique approach to capturing everyday scenes with painterly qualities has inspired artists and filmmakers and contributed to a broader appreciation of colour photography as an art form.
From left to right: Foot on El (1954), Near the Tanager (1954), Untitled & Undated and Paris (1959) by Saul Leiter.
Some of my street photography that captures the essence of Leiter follows the main article below, but my main interest in glass stems from a desire to fuse images/negatives between sheets of glass and cause a reduction burnout, leaving only residual elements, as a way of mapping impermanence. Still researching that!
The result of my research and reading into the philosophical and cultural aspects of glass led to the following conversation...
────
Glass: A Conversation
Glass as a Cultural Technology: Trust and Distortion
Glass occupies a rare position in human culture. It is one of the most trusted materials, precisely because it appears not to act at all. Transparency has long been confused with truth. To see through something is to believe one has access to what is real, unmediated, and uncorrupted. Yet glass has never been neutral. From its earliest uses, it has fashioned not only what we see, but also how we come to believe.
Historically, glass enabled revolutions in knowledge. Lenses extended human perception beyond the limits of the naked eye. Microscopes revealed cellular worlds. Telescopes displaced humanity from the centre of the heavens. Hans Blumenberg and later Bruno Latour suggest that modernity is inseparable from its instruments of seeing. Knowledge is always produced through an apparatus. Glass was among the first materials to make this apparatus appear invisible. The medium effaced itself from consciousness, even as it profoundly altered our perception.
The invisibility of glass is where trust begins. We learn to believe in it because it does not announce itself. Windows promise access without interference. Vitrines promise protection without distortion. Spectacles promise correction rather than transformation. But glass always bends light. It refracts, filters, thickens, and thins. Even the clearest pane imposes a viewpoint, a boundary, and a framing. What passes through glass is already interpreted.
Walter Benjamin’s reflections on mechanical reproduction resonate here. Just as photography claims objectivity while quietly transforming aura, glass promises immediacy while structuring the experience. Both operate as technologies of belief. We trust what they show us because we are taught not to notice them.
In modern society, this trust has metastasised. Screens, the descendants of glass, mediate nearly every social, political, and emotional exchange. Smartphones and tablets have become ubiquitous. The architectural façades of glass-clad corporate towers now dominate skylines. Transparency has become an aesthetic and ethical value. Governments promise transparency. Corporations design glass headquarters to signal openness. Yet this visual openness often masks opacity. One can see everything and understand very little.
Philosopher Byung-Chul Han critiques this as the “transparency society.” Here, visibility replaces truth and exposure substitutes for understanding. Glass has become a moral metaphor rather than a material reality. The more transparent something appears, the less we question its construction. Distortion is not eliminated. It is merely normalised.
Glass, therefore, acts as a cultural lie we accept, not out of malice, but because it fulfils our wish for an easy truth. Glass, like photography, does not create falsehoods; instead, it filters, conditions and frames reality. Its influence is in how thoroughly this mediation fades from conscious awareness.
Decanters, Bottles, and Ornamental Glass: Slowing Truth Down
If glass broadly structures belief, then decanters and bottles work at a more intimate scale. They shape how we comprehend time, quality, and authenticity. Unlike windows or screens, they do not promise immediacy. Instead, they require us to wait.
The decanter is a device of patience. Its historical purpose was to separate wine from sediment and allow for controlled oxidation. This reveals a meaningful cultural assumption: truth is not always best accessed directly. Wine poured straight from the bottle is complete, yet incomplete. It has not yet been given time to speak.
As detailed in the history of wine decanting, this ritual arose not merely from necessity but from a taste culture. Decanting transforms wine by exposing it to air, softening tannins, releasing aromatics, and altering its flavour. It does not preserve wine; it risks it. To decant wine is to accept that value emerges through vulnerability.
This resonates philosophically. Unlike modern culture’s obsession with immediacy. With instant news, images, and judgments. The decanter favours waiting. It contends that understanding takes time; that clarity grows, and is not seized.
Old glass bottles extend this logic into memory. Bottles retain traces: stains, clouding, uneven thickness, and the marks of manufacture. They are vessels that once carried both meaning and substance - wine, medicine, poison, or sustenance. Now they hold residues. They function as mnemonic objects, what Pierre Nora might call lieux de mémoire: sites where memory crystallises when lived experience has vanished.
Importantly, these bottles often outlive their contents and the people who used them... survivorship bias made material. We inherit the vessel, not the life it contained. The object becomes authoritative simply by remaining. Like photographs, old bottles are believed because they persist.
Ornamental glass, particularly oversized or skewed forms like a purple brandy balloon, pushes this further. Such objects exaggerate glass’s contradictions: fragility and permanence, utility and excess, symmetry and flaw. Purple glass, often the result of manganese added to “clarify” glass, is especially telling. Intended to neutralise impurities, it slowly turns violet when exposed to sunlight. Time reveals the correction as a transformation.
Truth is not uncovered instantly. It is disclosed gradually, even against intention. The object becomes an unwitting archive of duration. Its colour is not decorative alone; it is historical.
In contemporary culture, authenticity is often equated with rawness or immediacy. These objects feel almost subversive. They tell us that some truths require mediation, ritual, and time. Meaning is not always intensified by speed; often destroyed by it.
Glass, Photography, and the Ethics of Mediation.
When we look at them together, glass and photography are both instruments that shape culture. They promise access while influencing belief. Both depend on trust. Both distort things while appearing neutral. Both preserve fragments of reality while erasing the bigger picture context.
Decanters and bottles introduce a critical complication: they slow down the act of knowing. They do not offer instant clarity. They demand attention, patience, and care. In doing so, they expose the myth that transparency equals truth.
Today, images circulate faster than understanding. Visibility is mistaken for knowledge. Slowing becomes political as well as poetic. To photograph glass vessels and then reproduce those photographs in resin (another idea I had) is not simply aesthetic. It is a thoughtful reflection on how we experience and process reality. It asks:
What do we trust, and why?
What survives, and what is lost?
How much time does truth require?
Glass is not just a window to the world. It shapes how we think and what we believe about what we see. Decanters remind us that belief, like wine, needs time, space, and a readiness to accept transformation...
────
Conversations... Compass Dreaming for the Mind
The words above and the fable below were written in the company of others. The thinking is not solitary; the ideas are shaped by those who have come before. What you are reading are conversations between myself, my work, and wider fields of thought. In Roland Barthes’ words, the text is a “tissue of quotations,” even when those quotations remain unspoken.
Reading List
Walter Benjamin (1936). The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Henri Bergson (1896). Matter and Memory.
Bill Brown (2001). Thing Theory.
Hans Blumenberg (1966). The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.
Roland Barthes (1957). Mythologies.
Jean Baudrillard (1981). Simulacra and Simulation.
Gaston Bachelard (1958). The Poetics of Space.
Edmund de Waal (2010). The Hare with Amber Eyes.
Vilém Flusser (1984). Towards a Philosophy of Photography.
Lee Friedlander (1970). Self Portrait.
Byung-Chul Han (2012). The Transparency Society.
Hugh Johnson (1989). The Story of Wine.
Saul Leiter (2006). Early Color.
Bruno Latour (1991). We Have Never Been Modern.
Alan Macfarlane & Gerry Martin (2002). Glass: A World History.
Marshall McLuhan (1964). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.
László Moholy-Nagy (1947). Vision in Motion.
Pierre Nora (1989). Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.
Hartmut Rosa (2013). Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity.
Simon Werrett (2010). Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Sciences in European History.
────
My Glass Images
Observations of light as it interacts with glass on the streets of Sydney (2020-25)
Street Reflections No. 5 (2021) by Stephen Lambeth.
Street Reflections No. 9 (2023) by Stephen Lambeth.
Street Reflections No. 8 (2023) by Stephen Lambeth.
Street Reflections No. 3 (2021) by Stephen Lambeth.
Street Reflections No. 1 (2020) by Stephen Lambeth.
The Latest Release of Works
This series considers landscape not as fixed scenery, but as an ongoing act of formation. The images trace the quiet influence of wind, water, heat, and time. Forces that sculpted the terrain long before a camera arrived to record it. Photographs do not simply reveal places; they interpret them.
Navigating My Artistic Site...
My website has had an overhaul. Some conversations are written and need to be posted, some series are still unfinished, but all in all, it's better than it was, which is fantastic!
The site is a place to chill, reflect, and slow down, and it's a lot like a tree. It has many branches, and those branches branch out as well. So treat it like you are climbing a tree. You know you have reached as far as you can go when you get to the leaves, or in this case, a bunch of images...
But most of all, take your time, wander and enjoy, Stephen
Street Reflections No. 6 (2021) by Stephen Lambeth.
────
The House of Glass Vessels
A Fable
A Fable
There was once, at the edge of a quiet town, a house whose windows were never shuttered.
It had belonged, people said, to a keeper of vessels — though his name had been forgotten in the way that names are forgotten when the person who carried them most carefully is also gone. What remained was the house, and the unlocked door, and inside, on shelves that lined every wall from floor to ceiling, hundreds of objects made of glass.
Decanters with long necks and wide shoulders, shaped like patient lungs. Bottles whose interiors were stained faintly amber, as though the wine they had held had left behind a memory it could not entirely take with it when it left. Bowls and globes and ornaments of no clear purpose. And among them, on a shelf near the window, several balloon-shaped vessels of a colour that was not quite purple and not quite clear — a colour that had not been intended, that had arrived slowly over decades through the action of sunlight on glass, the correction becoming transformation, the attempted clarity becoming something stranger and more honest.
The door was unlocked.
People entered sometimes, though rarely for long.
One evening, a young woman arrived who had been walking for several days without quite knowing why.
She had come from a city where every surface reflected, and every person carried a small luminous pane through which they received the world continuously, in curated fragments, pre-interpreted, delivered at a speed that precluded the kind of looking that changes what is seen. She had believed, until recently, that this was simply how knowledge worked — that information was a substance you accumulated, that enough of it added up to understanding.
She had a notebook in her bag that she had not opened in two years.
She had told herself she was not the kind of person who kept notebooks. What she meant was that she had not been able to slow down enough to need one.
Inside the house, the air was cool and smelled of dust and something older than dust — the particular atmosphere of places that have held many things and released them slowly. She stood in the dimness while her eyes adjusted.
At first, she saw nothing unusual.
Glass is rarely remarkable to those accustomed to it.
But as the light settled, she noticed something: none of the vessels were quite symmetrical. Each had an irregularity — a thickening, a curve that leaned slightly too far, a ripple frozen in the surface like a thought interrupted. She lifted a bottle and held it toward the window.
The trees outside bent. The horizon curved. A passing cloud fractured into three versions of itself.
This distorts everything, she said, to no one in particular.
Of course it does, said a voice from deeper in the house.
The old woman at the table did not look surprised to find a stranger holding her bottles.
She looked, if anything, like someone who had been expecting this particular stranger for some time and had simply been getting on with other things in the interim.
The visitor watched the horizon curve again, as though it had forgotten how to remain straight.
It shows you something, she said, but not what I thought I was looking at.
She turned the bottle slightly. The trees bent again.
Then how do you trust it?, the traveller asked.
The old woman smiled — not the smile of someone who finds you wrong, but of someone who finds you almost right, which is a different thing entirely.
Glass, she said, is one of the most honest materials we have. Because it cannot pretend to be absent. Look through the window.
The traveller did. The trees appeared straight and orderly, the evening light falling on them with the neutrality of fact.
The traveller did. The trees appeared straight and orderly, the evening light falling on them with the neutrality of fact.
Now look through the bottle.
The trees curved. The light bent. The world became a different world, recognisable but transformed, as though seen through the memory of itself rather than directly.
The window also bends light, the old woman said. Every piece of glass does — every lens, every screen, every surface that promises transparency. The difference is that the window has learned to bend it so consistently that you stop noticing. The bottle is simply less practiced at concealment.
She gestured at the shelves.
These vessels have the virtue of their imperfections. They reveal themselves. They do not pretend to disappear.
The traveller moved through the room slowly.
She picked up one of the purple-tinted vessels and held it toward the window. Through it, the evening light arrived violet and strange and, she thought, more beautiful than it had any reason to be.
Why this colour?
The maker added manganese to clear an impurity, the old woman said. The glass appeared cleaner. Clearer. More transparent than before. He believed he had solved a problem.
She paused.
Then sunlight worked on it for decades, and the correction became this.
The traveller turned the vessel slowly. The colour shifted as the light moved through it — not purple, exactly, not amber, something between, something that had no name because it had not been intended and therefore no one had thought to name it.
The attempt at clarity became its own kind of transformation, she said.
The attempt at clarity became its own kind of transformation, she said.
Yes, the old woman said. Time revealed what the maker could not see. Which is what time does, if you give it the conditions.
On the table between them sat a decanter — wide at the base, narrowing to a long, elegant neck. The glass was slightly uneven, reinforcing its handmade appearance. Which it was.
What is that for? The traveller asked.
Waiting, the old woman said.
She poured a little wine from a dusty bottle into the decanter. The wine moved slowly, spreading across the base, beginning almost immediately to change — to open, the traveller thought, like a room when a window is raised.
In the old practice, the old woman said, wine was poured into a vessel like this before it was drunk. Air reached it. Sediment settled. The wine encountered its own nature at a different pace than the bottle had allowed.
And it became better?
Sometimes. Sometimes simply different. Always more fully itself than it had been.
She watched the wine breathe.
People discovered that the direct path — bottle to glass to mouth — delivered the wine before it was ready to be received. The decanter introduced a pause. A space in which the thing could become what it was trying to be.
The traveller sat down. She had not meant to sit down.
In your city, the old woman said, not unkindly, do you wait before deciding what something means?
The traveller looked at the luminous pane in her hand. At the accumulated fragments it had delivered to her today, each pre-interpreted, each arriving at a speed that made waiting feel like failure.
No, she said.
The decanter is a device for waiting, the old woman said. It is perhaps the oldest technology we have for the idea that understanding and information are not the same thing. That the gap between receiving something and knowing what it means requires time, and air, and the willingness to watch something change before you decide what it is.
The traveller was quiet for a moment.
Then she reached into her bag and took out the notebook.
She did not open it. She simply placed it on the table beside the decanter, where it sat in the evening light like something that had been waiting for a surface.
Why keep the empty ones? she asked after a while, looking at the shelves of bottles that held nothing but their own glass.
The old woman lifted an ancient vessel — the glass thick and uneven, full of the imperfections of a technology not yet refined.
The vessel survives longer than what it held, she said. This bottle is several hundred years old. What it contained — the wine, the celebration or the grief that accompanied it, the hands that made it and the hands that drank from it — all of that is gone. But the shape of the container remains.
The vessel survives longer than what it held, she said. This bottle is several hundred years old. What it contained — the wine, the celebration or the grief that accompanied it, the hands that made it and the hands that drank from it — all of that is gone. But the shape of the container remains.
She turned it slowly.
The shape tells us something. Not what was inside. But what the people who made it believed was worth containing. How they thought about the relationship between a thing and its vessel. What they understood about time and transformation, and the patience required to let something become what it was meant to be.
She set it down.
Every vessel is a theory about what deserves to be held.
The traveller looked at the notebook on the table.
She thought about the two years it had been closed. About the fragments she had accumulated instead — quick, bright, continuously delivered, each one displacing the last before it could be understood. She thought about the wine that had never been given a decanter. The thoughts that had never been given a page.
She opened the notebook.
It was not empty. There were entries from two years ago — observations, questions, half-formed things that had been looking for a form and had not found one and had been waiting, she now understood, in the amber residue of their original moment.
She read them as though reading someone else's handwriting.
She read them as though reading someone else's handwriting.
These still need time, she said.
Most things do, the old woman said. That is not a failure. That is the condition.
Outside, evening had become night. Stars appeared in the dark glass of the windows, bent slightly by the imperfect panes into shapes that were almost but not quite the shapes astronomers had named.
The traveller rose to leave.
At the door she paused, the way people pause at doors in houses that have changed something in them, reluctant to step back into a world that will require them to explain what changed.
What is the purpose of this house? she asked.
The old woman considered the question with the seriousness it deserved.
To remind people, she said, that every surface they see through is also a surface they see with. That there is no transparency — only degrees of acknowledged distortion. And that the vessel which reveals its own imperfection is more trustworthy than the one that has learned to conceal it.
And the rest of the time?
The old woman lifted the purple balloon toward the window. Through it, the stars bent and multiplied, each one fracturing into a small constellation of itself.
The rest of the time, she said, it is enough to hold the light and let it become something you did not expect.
The traveller stepped outside.
The night air was clear in the way that air is clear after you have spent time with someone who has changed the quality of your attention.
She walked back toward the road with the notebook open in her hands, writing by the light of the luminous pane she had finally turned face-down in her pocket — writing not quickly, not to capture, but in the way that the decanter held wine: openly, with air, with the willingness to wait and see what it became.
Behind her, the house glowed faintly in the starlight, every vessel on every shelf bending the universe in its own small and honest way.
And on the table, in the decanter, the wine continued to breathe — still becoming, still opening, still more fully itself with every passing moment than it had been the moment before.
As things are, when they are given the conditions.
As things are, when they are given time.
────
That's a wrap from me for now. There will be a notification of one or two 'Echoes' and the next edition of the THE QUARTERLY CONVERSATION delivered to your inbox if you choose to join the conversation...
Nothing major. Links to other artists, reflections on this conversation, and possible offerings to readers...
THE QUARTERLY
[ CONVERSATION ]