Nicole Bauberger | Phoenix Finding Form

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Nicole Bauberger, 2025

(courtesy of the artist)

Whitehorse-based multidisciplinary artist Nicole Bauberger pulls a variety of methods and materials together to explore the beautiful glass we can’t recycle in the Yukon. The show is called Phoenix Finding Form. All of the works in the show will depict a female figure wearing a raven headdress with a suggestion of wings that also imply ribbons or broken bonds.

The figure emerged out of Bauberger’s performance practice. “The gesture came from performing poetry with cello player Cai Krikorian,” Bauberger said. “The Phoenix character itself emerged as a costume/puppet for the NDG (Notre-Dame-de-Grâce) Arts Week Parade in Montreal this past August. When I got home from Montreal this figure remained with me, and I was compelled to draw it onto cardboard multiple times.”

In September Bauberger received support from the Canada Council for the Arts to undertake a learning residency at Lumel Studios, working with glass from the waste stream. She began experiments towards making the figure there. As for the design, the Teegatha'Oh Zheh progressive studio in Whitehorse welcomed her in on Thursdays where she refined her imagining of the figure in conversation with the community of artists there. She painted it full-size onto two canvases to make an image six feet tall and six feet wide. The lower part of this canvas appeared in the group’s March exhibition at the Warehouse.

Over the winter Bauberger redrew the figure onto plywood, then created another drawing onto discarded mylar. The purpose of the plywood drawing was to use as a support to create the figure in low-relief in clay. “The mylar is a working drawing, a road map to help me measure and figure out how to render the figure in glass,” Bauberger said.

In January, as Artist in the Window at Yukon Artists at Work, Bauberger created a low-relief version of the figure in clay on the plywood drawing. “I needed to cut it into pieces so that it would fit in my kiln,” Bauberger explained. “I had to cut it in two different ways, because I planned to render the figure in two different kinds of glass from the waste stream: old glass shelves, and bottles”.

For her bottle-glass rendition of the figure, Bauberger gratefully received specific kinds of bottle glass diverted by the staff at Raven ReCentre in Whitehorse.

Each of the renditions in their different media become a tool for the way the image appears in another form. “While I was working on the clay, I realized I was making a tool, a tool to touch the glass when it’s in my kiln, to shape it when it’s too hot for me to get anywhere near.”

Breaking is a key element to these works. Bauberger breaks and re-fused glass to create textures and differences in her compositions. Embracing breaking as part of the process, both deliberate and accidental, is at the heart of what this work has to say. The project is about process – about “finding form” – and so some of the pieces will continue to evolve past the opening, coming closer to Bauberger’s vision.

Bauberger is grateful to the Microgrant program of the Yukon government’s Arts Unit for support in completing this piece.

The work will return to its sources in a performance on April 24 at the gallery. At 7:30 pm, cello player Cai Krikorian and storyteller Mauretia Holloway will join Bauberger for an evening of music and poetry, with a short artist talk celebrating the communities that supported the development of “Phoenix Finding Form”. Holloway will then tell the story of Inanna’s descent to the realm of the dead, which resonates with this work. No more than 20 tickets will be available for this concert, which will be sold as a fundraiser for Yukon Artists at Work, with all of the ticket price going to the non-profit’s operations. Please email whitehorseartexperiences@gmail.com for tickets.

“Phoenix Finding Form” will come down on April 26, but an excerpt from the show will be installed at the Whitehorse Public Library from May 15 to June 15. Bauberger will make a presentation about this project at the Glass Arts Association of Canada Conference, which will take place at Lumel Studios and the Kwanlin Dun Cultural Centre in Whitehorse on June 6 and 7.