2024, ‘Gathering: Around Glass’
in winter 2024 I teamed up with Danielle Colón to curate an exhibition of Melbourne glassblowers at Unassigned Gallery in Brunswick, Victoria.
The exhibition was built to demonstrate the ways economics affects the creative process for glassblowers. Glassblowing is an expensive medium, and one that is rarely the first material an artist finds in their career. These factors lead to practises that are almost always multidisciplinary, with glassblowers engaging in a range of different mediums alongside their practiser in glass. These additional mediums do not exist in a vacuum, they fead the creative process and inform the glassblowing in a myriad of ways.
For the exhibition, artists were asked to provide at least 1 piece of blown glass, as well as at least 1 piece of non-blown glass.
Below is a list of the artists curated into the show and their range of mediums:
Juniper Maffescioni - glassblowing, glass casting, 3d Printing, music
Tegan Hamilton - glassblowing, drawing, painting
Danielle Colón - glassblowing, sculpture, painting, site-based installations
Rory Branson - glassblowing, stone carving
Billy Crellin - glassblowing, photography, sound design
Bradley east - glassblowing, engraving, drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, photography, videography
Calum Donaldson - glassblowing, wood carving
Hamish Donaldson - glassblowing, engraving, drawing
Nick Doran-Adams - glassblowing, digital design
Laura De Carteret - glassblowing, metalsmithing
Works in the show included carved wood and stone, video, paintings, installations, 3d printings, drawings, sculpture in various materials and found object assemblage.
In addition to the central theme of the show, the exhibition was held to celebrate the community nature of glassblowing, it is a unique medium in which every artist knows one another and often shares space with many different practitioners. Beyond the multidisciplinary practises are a group of people who feed off of one anothers’ creativity and complement each other creatively. The opening night became a gathering of familiar faces and friends all happy to celebrate the hard work of the artists, and to encourage the new generation coming up alongside those in the show.
As part of the opening night, each artist was asked to provide two drinking glasses which could be purchased and used with the exhibition wine. A select few artists at the very early stages of their careers was invited to take part in this component as a soft-opening for exhibiting their own work. These artists were Keely Valmaris and Clare Millar.
