The exhibition NOOSPHERE / The Others Are Allies at the former Mastný Factory in Lomnice nad Popelkou will showcase the work of five artists whose primary medium is glass. Through glass and other inorganic materials, they create connections within the realms of water, stones, microorganisms, insects, and imaginary creatures. An integral part of the exhibition are also the results of creative workshops with children held prior to the exhibition.

For the exhibition’s title, the artists borrowed the concept of the “noosphere” from geologist and philosopher P. T. de Chardin, who describes it as a “planetary thinking network” or a “planetary network of consciousness.” The noosphere, a union of the living (the biosphere) and the non-living (the geosphere), is according to the definition of the Czech Academy of Sciences a unified whole in which evolving society and nature intertwine and influence each other very intensely. A similar intermingling of the living and the non-living, the natural and the man-made, is also evident in the exhibited works, which are created by combining inorganic materials and organic narratives.

Alžbětka Vocelová will present her series of fascinating creatures Potvoráci at the exhibition, created through traditional glassblowing over a burner and firing. Anežka Stupková will exhibit her Tušení krajiny, which imaginatively captures the world of insects using ceramic glazes, giving space to creatures we often overlook and thus encouraging us to discover them. Barbora M. Tydlitátová will introduce exhibition visitors to her objects from the series Trash Gems, which embody the encounter between the present and a possible future. The gems are created from ground colored waste glass from a local glassworks, which would otherwise be landfilled as mixed waste. They are then fused while hot with a blown glass vessel, representing the body of a contemporary human entity. Another work on display will be glass objects by Josefína Váchová, last year’s winner of the prestigious Stanislav Libenský Award. Her series titled Fytolites is inspired by the structures of soil microparticles, whose shapes the artist has then rendered artistically. The resulting work seeks to draw attention to the reality of plants, which is usually hidden from our senses. Tereza Anna Tydlitátová will present a series of free-form paintings Rivers, which she perceives as living beings, the veins of the landscape, each with its own symbolism.