Hearts and Minds by Harriet Schwarzrock and Penny Byrne at Canberra Glassworks

Reviewed by Kerry-Anne Cousins

Harriet Schwarzrock's major installation work, Interconnected 2018, occupies most of the Canberra Glassworks gallery while Penny Byrne's sculptural figure in glass, Hurt Locker 2015, alone occupies the adjourning circular Smokestack gallery.

Schwarzrock was the Art Group Creative Fellow for 2017. This fellowship has enabled her to work in a studio at the Canberra Glassworks on her major installation works involving blown glass and neon lighting. In March last year, she and partner Matthew Curtis, who have a studio in Queanbeyan, had a very successful exhibition, Defining Moments, at the Canberra Glassworks where they cheerfully charted the ebb and flow of their art practice.

Schwarzrock's interest in the technology associated with the use of neon lighting has been part of her art practice for several years now. It might be that the 2017 between stillness and movement installation in the current exhibition had its genesis in another exhibition called Little Acts of Kindness at Craft ACT in 2007. In this group show, Schwarzrock's work was of a series of red-blown glass hearts. Initially the artist started making the hearts because she was interested in their abstracted organic forms. In her installation in the Craft ACT show called A Common Thread, several red heart forms were linked visually by silk thread. They explored the idea of "connectedness" - a concept that appears again in the current exhibition. However, what was also significant was the artist presented them on a light box lit from below so all the glass hearts glowed ruby red.

In the Canberra Glassworks exhibition, the former light box is overtaken by a much more sophisticated use of neon technology. Between stillness and movement, in all its pulsating, flickering and illuminated colour, dominates the gallery space. It is hard not to be completely mesmerised by a work that brings together, so successfully and satisfyingly, much of the concepts behind the artist's previous practice. Sixty illuminated beating hearts cannot be ignored. Each heart-shaped form contained in a darkened shadow box is made from richly coloured blown glass. When they are touched (this is an interactive work), they either change colour slightly so you feel you have dented their surface or more dramatically are charged with an electric current that appears as a lightning strike in the dark interior of the heart. The whole wall glows with these neon gas lit glass hearts in their dark black boxes. A related work, The Fourth State of Matter – a collaboration between Schwarzrock and sound artist Brian McNamara – may lack the wow impact of the former work but supplies through the same heart forms when touched, the sound of a heartbeat, at once loud and strong then fainter as it fades away.

Byrne's work Hurt Locker 2015 is, by contrast, a rather startling encounter. In the circular Smokestack gallery, a dark figure looms up in the darkness. Byrne's life-size male figure is made of glass held together in an armature of metal – its interior lit by a red inner glow. Byrne is better known as a ceramic artist who recycles kitsch ornaments to make political and satiric statements. Hurt Locker, the name given to this enigmatic sculpture on view as part of the Hearts and Minds exhibition, is the result of the artist's participation in the 2015 Venice Biennale. Selected artists who were not glass artists were invited to work with the Berengo glass studio artists on the Venetian island of Murano. Their work was shown at the 2017 Venice Biennale exhibition Glasstress. The curatorial theme of the Biennale was Gothic style and ideas in a contemporary world.

Byrne's figure embraces the Gothic through the concept of medieval body armour. Byrne also considered armour in a contemporary context, where it is worn by riot police and combat troops. An irony the artist acknowledges is while armour is designed to protect the body, there is also the accompanying acknowledgment of the danger and vulnerability of the body in conflict situations. The irony, and poignancy, that attaches to the work is also underlined by the artist, who has made part of the armour in metal but the rest in the fragile material of glass. Vulnerability of the human body is only one aspect of this complex work that can be too easily read as a representation of the inhuman anonymity of mindless aggression - a concept symbolised, perhaps too convincingly, by the faceless robotic mechanisation of Byrne's rendering of the human figure.