Craft & Design Gallery – Resonant Objects: Contemporary Australian Glass

This Collection display, with its focus on contemporary Australian glass, complements the exhibition Luminous: the Tom Malone Prize 2003-2017.

It showcases many of the glass acquisitions AGWA have made since the beginning of the Tom Malone Prize in 2003. Several of these works were shortlisted in various years of the Prize; others were acquired outside the Prize but selected on the basis of the intimate knowledge of the glass field in this country we have gained whilst running this glass initiative.

What unites the works in the display is a sense of calm and an almost meditative quality. Each work is a still point, a distillation of ideas and forces that is both active and incredibly quiet. This is the world pared back to its essentials through incredible dexterity and an always rich understanding of what glass can do. While the artists here, therefore, make work rooted in immense technical facility, they do not foreground skill for its own sake. As such, these artists use glass because of what it uniquely offers for artistic expression: it holds and filters projected and available light; it offers rich and subdued colour; it sits between sculpture and the two-dimensional.

In this manner, the artists here extend key threads in the contemporary art world that their work is a significant part of. How we experience the world, as sensation and idea, is the overarching thematic. For instance, Cobi Cockburn’s nine part wall piece sets us dramatically against a horizon as it examines of our place in the world and the ways life is connected to the rotations of our planet; David Hay shows us earth as seen from above, with his imaginative landscapes combining exterior and interior dimensions to create a shifting whole that mirrors the ways we move through spaces of the mind and the real world.