The winner of the Hindmarsh Prize 2018 is Kate Baker. The other finalists are Brenda L. Croft, Brendan van Hek, Clare Belfrage, Dan Venables, Emma-Kate Hart and Fernando Melendez, Harriet Schwarzrock, Holly Grace, Jeremy Lepisto and Nick Stranks, Kate Nixon, Kirstie Rea, Lisa Cahill, Lucy Palmer, Madeline Cardone, Mark Eliott, Mel Douglas, NOT, Richard Whiteley, Rose-Mary Faulkner, Scott Chaseling and Yusuke Takemura.

Baker graduated from the ANU School of Art in 1999. Her art studies included studio glass, photography, printmaking and sculpture and she has incorporated these interests into her subsequent work. Baker has received many accolades in her career. She has been a finalist in the Ranamok Prize and, as well as exhibitions in Australia, she has exhibited at the Glass Biennale in Venice, Bullseye in America, the Alexander Tutsek Foundation in Germany and at the International Exhibition of Glass in Japan. She took part recently in Singapore Contemporary 2017.

Baker's work is concerned with portraying the human figure through photographic images that are transferred onto glass panels backed by aluminium sheets. These layers distil and blur the images so that they become indistinct and elusive. The images are partnered with encoded computer language inscribed on the glass in a series of marks, letters and signs to suggest the technological world we now inhabit. The winning work, Lena on the Tramp, 2018 is a compelling image that partially reveals the image of the artist’s young daughter. Her outstretched legs and bare feet make her appear fragile and vulnerable within an undefined space that is disquieting. It is a mature and resolved work that brings together in a very poetic and complex way Baker’s interest in the human figure within the constructed environment.

There are a number of artists in the exhibition who use glass as a "canvas" for imagery. The special properties of glass in reflecting and distorting light make it a very seductive medium. Faulkner’s set of panels Bare 2-4, 2017 uses layered photographs and the soft focus of diffused light to trace the contoured landscape of the human body. Cahill’s two-panelled work Beside the Escarpment lll, 2018 is an evocation of a dark brooding landscape created in emotive brushstrokes in enamel on glass. We are drawn into the work by the passage of light that guides us through the landscape compelling us to supply a personal narrative from our own traditions and memories.

Rea’s Clarity in the Unresolved, 2018 references the iconic Australian bush landscape in a series of photographs taken of reflections on open glass doors of the artist’s home. It is an iconic view of the Australian landscape that would be recognisable to many of our colonial artists. Rea suggests that the dialogue with the colonial past which she has recreated in this symbolic way has relevance for our engagement with our history in a contemporary context.

Cardone’s work Something About the Rain, 2018 is an elegant abstracted distillation of a physical phenomenon. The drops of rain running down a window are conveyed by the deceptively simple device of raised lines of blue glass on a dark deep blue background. The placement of the lines and their relationship to the surrounding space is beautifully modulated and sensitively felt. In its invitation to contemplation, Cardone’s work relates to the two forms by Mel Douglas, Liminal, 2018. In her two glass forms Douglas creates a dense surface of tiny etched lines, part of a deeply contemplative experience creating or "drawing" a three-dimensional form in space.

Nixon’s glass mirror mosaics cover an ordinary garbage bin. This work, For Collection, 2018, is a successful three dimensional extension of her mosaic wall panels seen recently in the 2018 Craft ACT members’ exhibition. The works look at the stuff we have and what we leave behind. The so-called "bling" appearance of the garbage bin cleverly suggests that its glittering surface is a distraction from acknowledging the rubbish inside.

Closer to Silence, 2018 by Takemura is an eye-catching work of a slender teardrop-shaped clear glass cut into numerous free shapes hanging pendulum-like in space. Its complex interplay of material and immaterial space reflects the artist’s interest in the conscious and unconscious mind based on his study of the Zen philosophy of Daisetz Suzuki.

The works this year appear lost in the large exhibition space which may be due to more works on panels and fewer three-dimensional objects. Canberra, however, will not have much time to enjoy the exhibition because after September 30, in an exciting new development, selected works will travel to the Toyama Glass Museum in Japan to be on exhibition from October 24 until November 4 this year.