Various artists: Upending Expectations: studio glass. Canberra Glassworks. Until June 5. canberraglassworks.com.
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There is no binding group theme to this Canberra Glassworks travelling exhibition so the works provide a welcome insight into the art practice of 10 glass artists during a period when exhibitions have been infrequent. Jonathan Jones' work will be included in the exhibition at a later date.
Kirstie Rea's work has moved away from her beautifully sculptured falling glass draperies to reflections on the landscape through mirrored images.
In her work Complacent Complacency, shown to advantage in the roundhouse space, she reacts almost violently to the destruction caused by the 2020 bushfires that destroyed so much of the natural environment.
A dark carapace made from curving glass and rubber encases an inner body that seems to melt into its cement plinth.
The work takes on a dark menacing aspect, embodying not only the symbolic ashes of what was but also the harbinger of what is to come.
Annie Cattrell, Gabriella Bisetto and Harriet Schwarzrock have work that investigates the human body - not its outward appearance but its internal workings.
Cattrell's glass showcase encases what looks like a leafless tree with spreading branches but is in fact based on the intricate respiratory network of our lungs.
Bisetto uses her breath not only to blow her molten glass forms but encases this breath within their organic structures. These forms represent the cells that divide and renew within our bodies. Desgenetez creates large luminous glass sculptures relating to fragmented body parts.
A large natural stone echoes eloquently the form of her work, Elemental body. Schwarzrock has always been interested in the human heart as a cultural form as well as a physical organ.
She combines her heart-like glass forms with gently pulsating neon light that gently animates the components of complex interrelated works called offset, poise, and indivisible, perhaps referencing the heart as the repository for states of being.
Rose-Mary Faulkner's wall panel Profile is of a misty off-focus image of the artist's body in which she as the subject and the creator of the image directs the gaze of the spectator tantalising and confusing its focus.
Mel Douglas and Cobi Cockburn have also created wall panels that are subtle in their complexity. Mel Douglas has continued to engage with the dissolution of the image in light.
In Lucency 11 the panel is divided by a stroke of light as if a finger is drawn across a dusty surface, disrupting gently the calm negative space. Cobi Cockburn's panel is called Murmuration - a word for a flock of birds flying in a synchronised formation.
Each of the rods that make up her glass panels is unique but each shares (like the birds) certain characteristics that make them conform to a greater visual grouping.
Brendan Van Hek's installation also groups objects but of different materials like wood, glass and neon light. They are held in a collected suspension by their similarity of pattern that is echoed rhythmically in neon line and three dimensional glass and wood forms.
Nicholas Folland's Untitled (29-33) work is an assemblage of found objects and LED lighting. Cut glass is now out of fashion as a trip to any op shop will demonstrate.
It has, however, been used in the past for utilitarian and decorative purposes, its multifaceted surfaces displaying the brilliance of its ability to reflect light. Folland has highlighted this quality using cut-glass vases mounted on the wall.
Their reflected light casts intricate patterns bringing a focus to these now unloved but skilfully made victims of domestic fashion.