1.3 Romanticism and the Australian Studio Glass Movement
I revisit the development of studio glass in Australia to propose Romanticism as a context that may indicate future directions for Australian studio glass practice.
A Note on Romanticism
Romanticism emerged in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century as a recognised movement. Although Romanticism was united in its rejection of the Enlightenment, there is no common language of visual forms that marks a work as romantic. Romanticism reflects a plethora of viewpoints. In part this demonstrates the importance the movement placed on independence and the free exercise of the facility of judgement. Romanticism is an approach distinguished by attitude rather than formal values or subject matter. In Romanticism there is no single pathway, no single answer. It concerns itself with liberating the spark of creativity, and it does this through emotions and imagination, and the reverie that can result. Its influence is pervasive and deeply embedded in contemporary creative attitudes and approaches. It can emerge where least expected.
Placing a context of Romanticism over the history of Australian studio glass is not a seamless proposition. Unlike Romanticism studio glass is not associated with the dark and unconscious forces that move within the sub-conscious, and studio glass artists are usually not alienated rebels marginalised by suffering. But, although as studio glass artists we may reflect a somewhat lighter romanticism, we do admire works that display power, energy and vitality. Without this, as when a work is done according to rules, or when a work is conventionally executed with evident self-conscious awareness of technique and outcome, the work might show elegance, but it lacks life.
As with Romanticism itself, the diversity within Australian studio glass burns holes through any blanket statement. I am not proposing that Australian studio glass as a movement, or that any artist within the movement, is wholly romantic, but characteristics of romanticism reflect in creative elements within Australian studio glass. Passion is a characteristic of Australian studio glassmakers, individual difference is highly valued and imitation is rejected. If there is a centre of gravity for the group, it is their medium, and a major relevance of romanticism to a study of this group is that many of its practitioners hurl their creativity against glass. In doing this they learn what they are in the world, and in turn reveal themselves through the gesture evident in their work.
Experimentation and Artistic Individualism
Romanticism’s greatest virtue is sincerity, or what could also be called authenticity.[1] Australian studio glass is characterised by artists who will literally travel great distances to find their own voice. They seek this voice through a medium, and with an openness to discovery that is present in Australian studio glass from its beginning.
After graduating from university in Melbourne in 1961 Cedar Prest, who was in London with a job in cancer research, discovered art schools teaching stained glass. She took that opportunity to learn what she could about technical processes for making glass sculptural, rather than staying with traditional (flat-work) stained glass approaches. Prest explored glass, ignoring boundaries that then existed between glassmaking processes – between flat glass, sculptural glass and blown production work. She developed her own techniques,[2] and as part of an apprenticeship program went to Brierley Hill in England to learn glassblowing at the Stuart Crystal factory. Through decades of conscientious promotion of Australian subject themes Prest’s practice illustrated individual artistic expression made specific to person and place. Like Prest, Shar Feil-Moorman was not in contact with anyone in the glass movement when she began experimenting with glass in 1971. Feil-Moorman was intrigued by the contradictions in glass – its fragility, and yet its toughness – and she experimented with precision and logic to discover its possibilities. For a time she took those skills to the Bullseye Glass Company Portland, Oregon. Both these artists sustained a long term commercial practice based on commissions. Both create works in response to project briefs utilising the intrinsic qualities of glass while working within the demands of client and client space. If there is romanticism in this it lies in their rugged experimental individualism, and in their persistence in maintaining their love affair with glass.
Adventurous experimentation is enriched by a related hunt to understand and share technical process. Seeking a material to give voice to what she wanted to express Maureen Cahill travelled to a visual arts school in Stourbridge, England where Keith Cummings [3] was teaching glass. On returning to Australia Cahill took a position teaching sculpture at the newly established Sydney College of the Arts where she was able to establish glass as a study at the college in 1978. Cahill’s approach to the courses she developed was based on individual experimentation, with a curriculum aligned to that of a sculpture studio within a fine arts school. As a student at Sydney College of the Arts in those formative years of the school, Keith Rowe remembers it as what he called “a conceptual college”,[4] and he noted that it encouraged the exploration of minimalism, conceptualism and performance art. Rowe remembers learning what he needed to know, as he needed to know it. Cahill is interested in the strength of ideas, and although she has high regard for the craft, she wants people to look at glass as an art medium. It is this philosophy that led her into the cooperative venture in 1982 that became the Glass Artists’ Gallery, based at first in Paddington, Sydney, and now sited in Glebe. Cahill’s love of glass moved from early experimentation in search of her artistic voice to supporting the voices of others. She now wishes to return to her own glass practice and again explore the expression of her ideas. Cahill is a driven personality exploding through life with a brutal optimism. She is a person consumed by a romantic vocation, and that makes her an evangelist for her medium whatever the personal cost.
Romanticism ranks motivation above consequence. The Australian studio glass movement is characterised by personalities driven by conviction. Stephen Skillitzi exemplified its adventurous and experimental ethos. Skillitzi experienced the emergence of the studio glass culture in the United States first-hand. Returning to Australia in 1970 he provided public exposure for studio glass with his own theatrical glassblowing performances. These were one-man events utilising basic, improvised equipment. Skillitzi was concerned with demonstrating the excitement inherent in glass processes, rather than the quality of any finished object. He attracted people with the risk and danger, heat and excitement of glass. Through Skillitzi’s efforts people were shown possibilities – this could be as simple as blowing molten glass into a bubble so thin that it could be immediately touched with naked fingers. These were feats of apparent magic designed to enthral. Although raising doubts about seduction,[5] the medium was brought to the public’s notice. Skillitzi work exhibits his romantic idiosyncrasy. A similar romantic idiosyncrasy is currently surfacing in Post-Glass experiments as its exponents attempt to find a contemporary relevance for glass practice.[6] Skillitzi demonstrates the free spirit of Romanticism with the risks that brings. Riding his enthusiasm for ideas he has experienced both public praise and apathetic disinterest in a career that tracks Australian studio glass from its genesis.
Romanticism is a matter of responding to the forces that move within your own life. Warren Langley sees what he did when working with glass as his way to make a living.[7] He does not see being a glass artist as ‘romantic’, however he an exemplar of Romanticism in studio glass. In Sydney in the mid-seventies Langley was taking a “few classes” in stained glass when he coincidentally came across a stained glass autonomous panel - an individual glass panel that marked a departure from the stained glass window tradition (glass integrated into architecture) while still using stained glass techniques. It was a three-dimensional example of Californian funk by American artist Paul Marioni. The panel’s independence from the architecture was a revelation for Langley. Arriving in Los Angeles at the start of a planned extended trip, he saw an advertisement for a Marioni workshop, which he spontaneously decided to attend. This led to a long road trip to also attend an early Pilchuck[8] residency glass program near Seattle. There he workshopped with Dale Chihuly, Dan Dailey, Fritz Dreibach and Marvin Lipofsky, and established long term friendships with these international pioneers of American studio glass.
Langley remembers the early days of Australian studio glass as excitingly new in its approach, and he remembers the studio glass practitioners as processing a heightened sense of community. He was developing kiln-forming technology, and an interest in and excitement with process innovation is still evident in his approach to the large architectural work he now undertakes. Langley admitted his earlier work was often unresolved because he was pushing limits to see what would happen. His glass was a vehicle for whatever consumed him at that point in time. After spending weeks researching, he would push an idea into the material in a way that was quick and rough, and then move to something new. A small chip in the glass did not concern Langley, and his favourite tool was an angle grinder. He says this work was about tactile glass used to translate patterns, marks and hand gesture. He was not interested in the prettiness of glass, but the way light comes off it. That is why his earlier works were heavily textured and crusty. Desiring immediacy he is a risk taker who often overpowers tradition with innovative processes. He developed technologies that lent themselves to his rapid, gestural responses in a material not known for being hands-on. It is his gesture that most marks Langley as a romantic. His gesture was evident in his object work and it leapt into the landscape with his Glass Equals Water Equals Glass project. That project incorporated large bodies of water. Langley used these bodies of water to reflect remote source lighting as if the water were glass. Langley’s interests now lie with large public projects. He defeats restrictions of scale associated with the glass object, while maintaining his love affair with the effects of glass and light. Langley’s work is evidence of a progression where an artist’s gesture swept beyond glass.
Life is a quest in which you search to find meaning, and acknowledge a calling when it presents to you. Dr Gerry King’s involvement with Australian studio glass as a significant maker and teacher was ignited when circumstances took him to Alfred University (in western New York State), which along with Wisconsin was a seedbed for American contemporary glass. At Alfred University, Andrea Billeci introduced King to the possibilities of glass. Initially focussed on ceramics as a visual arts teacher in Australia, King always sees himself as an artist whose creativity is supported by both good design and strong craft. Underlying King’s meticulously work are cultural narratives. Over thirty-seven years King says his work evolved through the interplay of idea and image that utilised symbolism through form, colour and pattern exquisitely executed.
To the romantic what matters is that you create with all you have in you. Peter Minson came from an industrial background as an expert practitioner in glass scientific instrument making. Scientific glass was the Minson family’s business for three generations, and there, as Minson explained, it was a matter of “make that”,[9] rather than a concern for the aesthetics of the object. But Minson always wanted to make art, and willingly left the family business to do so. Carrying across his approach to glass from his earlier life, Minson loves technical problem solving: as demonstrated by his independent pioneer experimentation with small glass furnaces for art-making. In the communal spirit that characterises Australian studio glass Minson is always generous with his extensive technical knowledge and is always happy to share it with those who ask. Minson always had mastery over technique. His search centres on finding visual forms that are identifiably his own. His excellently executed functional items such as teapots, and his goblet commissions fall short of meeting his romantic concept of the ‘artist’. He continues his four-decade search for those unique visual forms that will give him artistic recognition.
Missionary Zeal
Romantic artists claimed the right to go their own way as individuals. They persist in their individual sensibilities for, above all, Romanticism values the primacy of will reflected in an ideal to which you commit yourself. For such an artist art is a vocation. In this you meet resistance and in overcoming this resistance you come to know yourself. Glass offered Klaus Moje that resistance. I am not saying Moje is a romantic artist, but characteristics of Romanticism do inform his actions. Such an artist must show a self-faith demonstrating a force of character. When Moje took up his new appointment in 1983 as head of the glass workshop at the School of Art, Australian National University, Canberra he was on a mission. Moje’s singular focus proved to be of great benefit – to him, to that specific glass workshop, and to Australian contemporary glass generally. The autobiographical character of an artist’s output can identify an artist as a romantic. So too can emotional conviction.[10] Moje output was subject of the show, Klaus Moje: Painting with Glass, a retrospective at the Museum of Art and Design in New York in 2009. This exhibition reflected thirty-years of Moje’s devotion to the beauty of a material. It shows the development of a voice that grows from small intimate bowls, to then move to glass panels that speak from the wall as complex patterned glass canvasses, and that finally shouts in huge glass areas of boldly ‘painted’ colour.
Moje brought “a vocational bent and almost missionary zeal”[11] to his stewardship the ANU glass workshop. Moje wanted his students to focus on the material in a balance of creativity and skill[12] that would develop as their own voice.[13] In his rigorous development of material skill and his exploration colour Moje could be seen as a classical modernist in the Bauhaus tradition. This could be interpreted another way. In his 2010 solo exhibition, Dance of Colours at the Sabbia Gallery, Sydney, Moje demonstrates he is a master of process, but this does not mean the material is mastered. Romanticism is evident in the unpredictable struggle with material, as an artist fights to translate imagination into substance. In this struggle a true conversation begins. A resolution of formal elements is achieved through Moje’s embodied skill and this takes us back into the romantic ancestry of modernism through the symbolists and what Henri Dorra identified as “musicality … the artist’s creation of the harmonious (or deliberately discordant) as well as expressive effects by line and colour, comparable to what the composer creates with rhythm and notes and a poet with prosody, ”[14] that is, through the aesthetics of pure form. Moje is using glass, and knowledge developed over a lifetime, like a virtuoso musician might use a favourite instrument.
A number of figures are responsible for establishing Australian studio glass culture. They are teachers who shared their artistic attitudes and technical processes within institutions and workshops. They created a context for Australian studio glass open to international influences while grounded in technical process. Processes are expanded by an experimental attitude centred on individual creativity. Australian glassmakers take from established traditions with what arts administrator Brian Parkes calls a “backyard-shed mentality”[15] – by which he implies they use what is available to them with staggering inventiveness.
Australian Glasswork as Interpretations of Landscape
In 1985 Jenny Zimmer wrote in a review of the first international touring exhibition of Australian and New Zealand studio glass that, “there was not one kangaroo, kookaburra or gumnut featured in the work”.[16] However, in an exhibition catalogue she observed that the landscape was still a preoccupation of Australasian glass artists.[17] The evocative nature of place plays a significant role in romanticism. Responses to landscape are still evident, and now as then, Australian imagery is intrinsic to some studio glasswork. At times Australian imagery is overtly explored,[18] but reference to place is also multivalent and appears in subtle and sophisticated abstractions.
In her painted glass, artist Summer Sanders reflects her culture and her family ties to country in western New South Wales. Sanders’ abstraction is anchored in the telling of the indigenous traditional stories she feels are embedded in the landscape. Cobi Cockburn “draws on native grasses for her colour palette and literal link to the land”.[19] Lisa Cahill writes of distilling “the essence of the harsh, dry landscape”.[20] Kirstie Rea talks of her love of the big blue sky as a clear thinking space, and of the Australian landscape pushing her horizontally (as reflected in her work), just as Clare Belfrage abstracts the lines on a eucalyptus tree into her glass forms in an attempt to capture the wonder that initially drew her attention to that aspect of the landscape. Belfrage writes that she seeks “a quiet rhythm found through intense repetition and the timelessness and restfulness found in detail”.[21] As Neville Assad-Salha said, these interpretations of landscape capture “aspects of nature that can resonate in everyone, even if it’s on a subliminal level”.[22] These examples reflect a refined development of process that engages the viewer with simulacra of Australian landscape – a merging of material and process to trigger aesthetic response through the same haunting qualities of form, space and light.
Identifying an Australian Studio Glass Style is Problematic
The works of these makers do reflect an intimate connection to landscape; however interpretations of landscape do not dominate glasswork in Australia and there is no other grand subject, or common language of visual forms that unites creative glasswork in this country (apart from the material itself). As is the case with Romanticism, individualism is dominant over any one theme or stylistic characteristic. It will be the work of the individual glass artist that is identifiable, rather than that the artist’s country of origin. A work is recognised as a ‘Moje’, or ‘Whiteley’, or a ‘Varga’, rather than ‘an Australian work’. Linked by their medium, there were (and are) many people working in many ways at the same time. Diversity in practice is unified by glass. As it is with romanticism, a linear history loses the subtlety and variation that makes up the background of Australian studio glass. Generalisation is usually a compromise. There are influences that may be traced back to institutional approaches to glass, but identifying these as stylistic markers characterising Australian studio glass is negated by the diversity of graduate work. Writing about the internationalism of studio glass in the early 1990s,[23] Susanne Frantz, then curator of twentieth-century glass with the Corning Museum of Glass, stated that while selecting works for the international New Glass Review it was almost impossible to discern any national, or regional styles. Bringing this into the present, Tina Oldknow, the current curator of modern glass at the Corning Museum of Glass, stated that Australian studio glass was not identifiable through particular national stylistic characteristics. [24]
The relatively small international community built around studio glass remains homogenous in its diversity. This apparent contradiction arises because the whole group is usually quickly aware of what any particular studio glassmaker is making. The desire to be recognised as a creative individual within that group means that, although technical innovations and work of other makers can be adapted, new works must evidence unique qualities. Adaptation must add aspects of originality if it is to be credited as authentic.
Romantic Individualism
Australian studio glass was pioneered by forceful personalities who willingly bound themselves to this material and its developing processes. Through role modelling, sharing and education that promoted individualised expression, these pioneers impacted strongly on those who followed. Within our community the strongly individualised forms that mark the work of these personalities intensified the tendency for an Australian glass piece to be engaged in relation to the field of studio glass, rather than within the broader field of contemporary art practice. This means that it is common for a studio glass piece to be read in relation to the work of other glass practitioners, that is, its comparative placement within the short history of international contemporary glass and beyond that, historic precursors in glass. A work is distinguished by its continuation of the technical signature and artistic gesture of its maker, and by its points of similarity to and difference from, the established signatures of others in the field. The points of difference are attributes pursued by makers. The ownership and recognition of the resultant mark of the maker is sought, and when it is achieved through some degree of aesthetic integrity, it is highly valued by all within both the international and Australian glass community.
The sharing nature of the glass community is balanced by the territorial nature of creative and commercial imperatives common to all visual arts promotion within the contemporary art market. A full-page advertisement in the first Craft Arts, October/December publication in 1984, which promoted Australian studio glassmaker Peter Crisp, by proclaiming that Crisp “brought to glass an originality of expression so often the preserve of his brush-wielding contemporaries”, was a logical outcome when technical mastery within one material is linked to creative individualism. Having ownership over their forms flows from a maker’s pride in his or her individual artistry and is common to all fields of artistic practice. In Romanticism it is the artist’s sensibility and emotional authenticity that confers validity onto a work.[25] These same qualities align a studio glasswork with Fine Art, rather than Craft practice. Contained within this ownership is the artist’s right to their own gesture, if not their technique.
History Reset
Much of the earliest Australian studio glass is primitive in technique and clumsy in form, and it relies on the quality of its medium to generate viewer engagement. Now the diversity within contemporary studio glass may allow it to be exhibited because it looks architectural, or woven, or a little bit ceramic, but isn’t. That is, some of the work being made creates curiosity and appears sophisticated, but it does not look like glass. Paradoxically it defies its connections because, although it is enabled by skill with material and process, these elements are not evidence of authentic contemporary practice, therefore the glass is presented as something else. That is, there are glassmakers who are looking to present their work in a way they feel will be accepted beyond their original community. This is not a bad thing. Richard Whiteley supports the few Australian studio glass artists who have made the leap into broader fine arts identities. It is goal he does not think we should all strive for, but he feels it does reflect a maturity and diversity amongst Australian glass practitioners.
In 1995 a former curator at the Corning Museum of Glass, William Warmus, wrote an essay called ‘The End?’.[26] He stated that the American studio glass movement was based in technological innovation and with techniques now mastered the movement is complete. Creative authenticity no longer rests in the material or in technical achievement. He argues that the dominant theme of studio glass concerns innovating the means in the method of studio glass, and now that means is refined and it is versatile. Warmus suggests in his essay that with their developed technique, it is time for glassmakers to explore the world through narratives. He argues that a methodology expressing this exploration through mastered technique is the way to renew energy in studio glass, which now sees some of its younger adherents (with aspirations directed elsewhere) showing their work in Fine Art contexts.
New from Old
There are elements of this assessment that in part explain our situation in Australia. As with its American precursor, the development of Australian studio glass is technically based. It develops as a sophisticated craft narrative expanded to accommodate individual aesthetic sensibilities expressing conceptual explorations in material, culture and identity. Technical process continues to provide the means for those explorations. As Australian practitioners, our developing skills, both adapted and invented, focus our glassmaking, and we are now recognised masters in techniques that we have invented or borrowed, refined and evolved.[27]
The force of our commitment to process has already been referenced in this paper as offering a productive future in design for some practitioners. Design will continue to provide a rich field for development, fulfilling briefs in built-for-purpose architectural glass, and in other types of functional glass.
Addressing Warmus’s suggestion in terms of future contemporary art, narrative always provided glass practice with a functioning epistemology.[28] Australian studio glass exhibits high skills-based competencies and a willingness to individually push the creative potential of glass. These qualities are always available for the deeper exploration of culture and self.
A brief review of two recent exhibitions exposes the fertile potential for studio glass in this country. Supported by highly competent technique and with their foundations firmly in glass as a means of romantic artistic expression, these exhibitions provide models ripe for continuing exploitation. The first was a group exhibition (sponsored by Artisan and Wagga Wagga Gallery in 2010) curated by Megan Bottari –‘Tour De Force: In Case of Emergency Break Glass’.
The exhibition’s methodology utilises material process to explore and articulate cultural references. The works are emotionally convincing, with one foot in language and the other in visual imagery as a means to tell stories. Although conceptually discursive, these works engage a powerful visceral response through the heterogeneity of visual representation. The epistemology utilises diverse cultural narratives expressed in object through the versatile materiality of glass. In the context of this exhibition glass is used in the presentation of ideas. These ideas expand the object as potential, and memory and expectation take us along the fragmenting paths of our contemporary culture. Themes incline to a quantitative Western aesthetic that describes and conveys the world as concept revealed through visual form.
Narrative is not the prerogative of glass alone. It is available to all media; however, glass demonstrates an impressive conceptual carrying capacity through its poetic potential and its representational availability as metaphor. The bond that artists represented in this exhibition have with glass is also strengthened, because, taking a line from Donald Kuspit’s book, The End of Art, they have the “craft necessary to create [formal] beauty as a dialectic counterbalance to their sometimes emotionally confronting subject matter”.[29]
The second exhibition, ‘Mind and Matter: Meditations on Immateriality’, Margot Osborne as curator (exhibited at the Jam Factory, Adelaide and Object Gallery, Sydney, 2010), also utilises highly developed material process, but the works in this show combine non-representational abstraction with the openness of ambiguity. This epistemology also expresses itself as object, but it is the materiality of glass, combined with light, that drives engagement with the works, and that engagement is meditative. This is nature as poetically revealed by artistic sensibility and it is exampled by our reaction to the materiality of glass. For the audience it is experienced as a sensation. The aesthetic is Eastern and qualitative as light dissolves form into formlessness and voids open, and presents us with the opportunity of experiencing the transcendental.
The approaches of both ‘Tour De Force’ and ‘Mind and Matter’ are romantic in that the intention is to engage us in a strong emotional response, not just reasoned appraisal. They play on perception, rather than concept in stimulating aesthetic experience within the phenomenon of their presentation, and their evaluation lies as a point along the line of our emotional engagement. As other exhibitions (Sabbia Gallery, 2009) by Kirstie Rea,‘In the Presence of Blue’ and Charles Butcher, ‘After the Object’ demonstrate, the aesthetic potential of visual form remains a rich seam for artists who chose glass as their medium.
While technical process dominates studio glass as a sophisticated craft narrative developed within the dialogue between glass and artist, the language of visual forms, identified with aspects of modernism, seems the natural home for studio glass. But this is misleading, for even glass artists strongly associated with modernist visual form are also guided by an individualism seeded in imagination, and their works are fed by the impact of colour and light and their felt responses to landscape. While Emma Varga may exploit traditional European craft skills in the sophisticated precision of her layered casting, at its centre her work is driven by a highly subjective internal vision.[30] Charles Butcher might push his forms to the demanding edge of what may appear to be a sophisticated minimalism, but he does this through an emotionally unrelenting psychological and physical commitment to his process and the resultant forms. Jessica Loughlin, with her technically highly refined works, may appear to be working towards a similar minimalist aesthetic, yet her works are simulacra of our landscape’s vastness. Using the materiality of glass and immaterial luminosity imparted to her work’s surface by light, Loughlin triggers psychological responses that allude to the sublime.
Romanticism is evident in approaches to Australian studio glass. The practitioners of Australian studio glass were always a diverse range of individuals more than willing to invent ways and push boundaries while using whatever resources are available to them. If artistic sensibility and glass synthesise within the numerous narrative fields available, the creative vein may continue to be highly productive.
[1] Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001,139.
[2] Cedar Prest, personal interview, 11/01/10, 2.
[3] Cummings became a significant figure in the international studio glass movement as an artist, technician, teacher and author.
[4] Keith Rowe, personal interview, 29/03/09, 2.
[5] Geoffrey Edwards, personal interview, 24/09/09, 2. There was on-going concern with ‘untitled sculptural forms’ that relied on process and material rather than strength of concept, sense of scale, or the scope of sculpture.
[6] Post-glass incorporates digital video in phenomenological experiments with glass technical process that challenge orthodox approaches to the studio glass object. It featured at the 2011 Ausglass conference in an exhibition curated by Anjali Srinivasan.
[7] Warren Langley, personal, interview, 31/08/09, 1.
[8] A major United States non-institutional glass school founded in 1971 to promote glass as a means of artistic expression.
[9] Peter Minson, personal interview, 20 and 23/02/09, 1.
[10] David Blayney Brown, Romanticism, London and New York: Phaidon, 2010, 179.
[11] Bill Brown, “Klaus Moje – Glass Artist”, ABC Radio National program, transcript posted on web 21 December, 2009, 3.
[12] Ibid. 4.
[13] Andrew Page, ‘Material Foundations: The Glass workshop at the Canberra School of Art reflects Klaus Moje’s deep respect for glass.’ The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly no. 98, New York: UrbanGlass Spring, 2005, 26.
[14] Henri Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories. A Critical Anthology, London: University of California Press, 1994, 3. References to musicality can also be found in personal interviews with Shane Fero, 14/01/09, 4 and Jeffery Hamilton, 25/03/09, 5.
[15] Brian Parkes, personal interview, 28/03/06, 4.
[16] Jenny Zimmer, ‘Glass from Australia’, Craft Arts no. 2, 1985, 105.
[17] Jenny Zimmer, Glass from Australia and New Zealand, catalogue, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 1984, 14.
[18] Examples can be found in Paddy Robinson’s Full Circle exhibition, Glass Artists’ Gallery 2010 (PR p. 2), Rish Gordon’s engraving, see in the Helen Crompton article, ‘Gordon Studio Glass’, Crafts Arts International no. 56, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2002, 49-50 and works such as the Snowy Mountain pieces by Holly Grace seen in Gordon Foulds’ article, ‘Holly Grace and the Scandinavian Aesthetic’, Craft Arts International no. 79, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2010, 54.
[19] Catrina Vignando, ‘Leaves of Glass New Work by Cobi Cockburn’, Craft Arts International no. 69, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2007, 53.
[20] Lisa Cahill, ‘Dry’, Ranamok catalogue. Ranamok Glass Prize, 2004, 18.
[21] Clare Belfrage, ‘Untitled’, Ranamok catalogue. Ranamok Glass Prize, 2002, 10.
[22] Neville Assad-Salha, ‘Place in Motion’, Craft Arts International no. 59, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2003, 87.
[23] Ausglass Post Conference (Sydney) publication, 1991.
[24] In response to my question after her ‘Art and Alchemy’ lecture at Sydney College of the Arts, August 2010.
[25] Honour, Romanticism, 20.
[26] William Warmus, ‘The End?’, The Urban Glass Quarterly no. 60. New York: Urban Glass Contemporary Glass Center, 1995, 42-45.
[27] 25 Years of New Glass Review from the Corning Museum of Glass, in representing the international studio glass movement, has Australian glassmakers with 17 makers represented, ranking third in those numbers representing each of the twenty nine international cohorts, Australians were narrowly behind the United Kingdom with 20 makers represented but still far behind the United States with 105. A significant majority of these Australian makers were selected in the last ten years.
[28] Geoffrey Edwards, ‘4th National Studio Glass Exhibition’, Craft Arts International no. 15, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 1984, 105.
[29] Kuspit, The End of Art, 69, 185.
[30] Emma Varga, personal interview, 02/12/08, 12.
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I revisit the development of studio glass in Australia to propose Romanticism as a context that may indicate future directions for Australian studio glass practice.
A Note on Romanticism
Romanticism emerged in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century as a recognised movement. Although Romanticism was united in its rejection of the Enlightenment, there is no common language of visual forms that marks a work as romantic. Romanticism reflects a plethora of viewpoints. In part this demonstrates the importance the movement placed on independence and the free exercise of the facility of judgement. Romanticism is an approach distinguished by attitude rather than formal values or subject matter. In Romanticism there is no single pathway, no single answer. It concerns itself with liberating the spark of creativity, and it does this through emotions and imagination, and the reverie that can result. Its influence is pervasive and deeply embedded in contemporary creative attitudes and approaches. It can emerge where least expected.
Placing a context of Romanticism over the history of Australian studio glass is not a seamless proposition. Unlike Romanticism studio glass is not associated with the dark and unconscious forces that move within the sub-conscious, and studio glass artists are usually not alienated rebels marginalised by suffering. But, although as studio glass artists we may reflect a somewhat lighter romanticism, we do admire works that display power, energy and vitality. Without this, as when a work is done according to rules, or when a work is conventionally executed with evident self-conscious awareness of technique and outcome, the work might show elegance, but it lacks life.
As with Romanticism itself, the diversity within Australian studio glass burns holes through any blanket statement. I am not proposing that Australian studio glass as a movement, or that any artist within the movement, is wholly romantic, but characteristics of romanticism reflect in creative elements within Australian studio glass. Passion is a characteristic of Australian studio glassmakers, individual difference is highly valued and imitation is rejected. If there is a centre of gravity for the group, it is their medium, and a major relevance of romanticism to a study of this group is that many of its practitioners hurl their creativity against glass. In doing this they learn what they are in the world, and in turn reveal themselves through the gesture evident in their work.
Experimentation and Artistic Individualism
Romanticism’s greatest virtue is sincerity, or what could also be called authenticity.[1] Australian studio glass is characterised by artists who will literally travel great distances to find their own voice. They seek this voice through a medium, and with an openness to discovery that is present in Australian studio glass from its beginning.
After graduating from university in Melbourne in 1961 Cedar Prest, who was in London with a job in cancer research, discovered art schools teaching stained glass. She took that opportunity to learn what she could about technical processes for making glass sculptural, rather than staying with traditional (flat-work) stained glass approaches. Prest explored glass, ignoring boundaries that then existed between glassmaking processes – between flat glass, sculptural glass and blown production work. She developed her own techniques,[2] and as part of an apprenticeship program went to Brierley Hill in England to learn glassblowing at the Stuart Crystal factory. Through decades of conscientious promotion of Australian subject themes Prest’s practice illustrated individual artistic expression made specific to person and place. Like Prest, Shar Feil-Moorman was not in contact with anyone in the glass movement when she began experimenting with glass in 1971. Feil-Moorman was intrigued by the contradictions in glass – its fragility, and yet its toughness – and she experimented with precision and logic to discover its possibilities. For a time she took those skills to the Bullseye Glass Company Portland, Oregon. Both these artists sustained a long term commercial practice based on commissions. Both create works in response to project briefs utilising the intrinsic qualities of glass while working within the demands of client and client space. If there is romanticism in this it lies in their rugged experimental individualism, and in their persistence in maintaining their love affair with glass.
Adventurous experimentation is enriched by a related hunt to understand and share technical process. Seeking a material to give voice to what she wanted to express Maureen Cahill travelled to a visual arts school in Stourbridge, England where Keith Cummings [3] was teaching glass. On returning to Australia Cahill took a position teaching sculpture at the newly established Sydney College of the Arts where she was able to establish glass as a study at the college in 1978. Cahill’s approach to the courses she developed was based on individual experimentation, with a curriculum aligned to that of a sculpture studio within a fine arts school. As a student at Sydney College of the Arts in those formative years of the school, Keith Rowe remembers it as what he called “a conceptual college”,[4] and he noted that it encouraged the exploration of minimalism, conceptualism and performance art. Rowe remembers learning what he needed to know, as he needed to know it. Cahill is interested in the strength of ideas, and although she has high regard for the craft, she wants people to look at glass as an art medium. It is this philosophy that led her into the cooperative venture in 1982 that became the Glass Artists’ Gallery, based at first in Paddington, Sydney, and now sited in Glebe. Cahill’s love of glass moved from early experimentation in search of her artistic voice to supporting the voices of others. She now wishes to return to her own glass practice and again explore the expression of her ideas. Cahill is a driven personality exploding through life with a brutal optimism. She is a person consumed by a romantic vocation, and that makes her an evangelist for her medium whatever the personal cost.
Romanticism ranks motivation above consequence. The Australian studio glass movement is characterised by personalities driven by conviction. Stephen Skillitzi exemplified its adventurous and experimental ethos. Skillitzi experienced the emergence of the studio glass culture in the United States first-hand. Returning to Australia in 1970 he provided public exposure for studio glass with his own theatrical glassblowing performances. These were one-man events utilising basic, improvised equipment. Skillitzi was concerned with demonstrating the excitement inherent in glass processes, rather than the quality of any finished object. He attracted people with the risk and danger, heat and excitement of glass. Through Skillitzi’s efforts people were shown possibilities – this could be as simple as blowing molten glass into a bubble so thin that it could be immediately touched with naked fingers. These were feats of apparent magic designed to enthral. Although raising doubts about seduction,[5] the medium was brought to the public’s notice. Skillitzi work exhibits his romantic idiosyncrasy. A similar romantic idiosyncrasy is currently surfacing in Post-Glass experiments as its exponents attempt to find a contemporary relevance for glass practice.[6] Skillitzi demonstrates the free spirit of Romanticism with the risks that brings. Riding his enthusiasm for ideas he has experienced both public praise and apathetic disinterest in a career that tracks Australian studio glass from its genesis.
Romanticism is a matter of responding to the forces that move within your own life. Warren Langley sees what he did when working with glass as his way to make a living.[7] He does not see being a glass artist as ‘romantic’, however he an exemplar of Romanticism in studio glass. In Sydney in the mid-seventies Langley was taking a “few classes” in stained glass when he coincidentally came across a stained glass autonomous panel - an individual glass panel that marked a departure from the stained glass window tradition (glass integrated into architecture) while still using stained glass techniques. It was a three-dimensional example of Californian funk by American artist Paul Marioni. The panel’s independence from the architecture was a revelation for Langley. Arriving in Los Angeles at the start of a planned extended trip, he saw an advertisement for a Marioni workshop, which he spontaneously decided to attend. This led to a long road trip to also attend an early Pilchuck[8] residency glass program near Seattle. There he workshopped with Dale Chihuly, Dan Dailey, Fritz Dreibach and Marvin Lipofsky, and established long term friendships with these international pioneers of American studio glass.
Langley remembers the early days of Australian studio glass as excitingly new in its approach, and he remembers the studio glass practitioners as processing a heightened sense of community. He was developing kiln-forming technology, and an interest in and excitement with process innovation is still evident in his approach to the large architectural work he now undertakes. Langley admitted his earlier work was often unresolved because he was pushing limits to see what would happen. His glass was a vehicle for whatever consumed him at that point in time. After spending weeks researching, he would push an idea into the material in a way that was quick and rough, and then move to something new. A small chip in the glass did not concern Langley, and his favourite tool was an angle grinder. He says this work was about tactile glass used to translate patterns, marks and hand gesture. He was not interested in the prettiness of glass, but the way light comes off it. That is why his earlier works were heavily textured and crusty. Desiring immediacy he is a risk taker who often overpowers tradition with innovative processes. He developed technologies that lent themselves to his rapid, gestural responses in a material not known for being hands-on. It is his gesture that most marks Langley as a romantic. His gesture was evident in his object work and it leapt into the landscape with his Glass Equals Water Equals Glass project. That project incorporated large bodies of water. Langley used these bodies of water to reflect remote source lighting as if the water were glass. Langley’s interests now lie with large public projects. He defeats restrictions of scale associated with the glass object, while maintaining his love affair with the effects of glass and light. Langley’s work is evidence of a progression where an artist’s gesture swept beyond glass.
Life is a quest in which you search to find meaning, and acknowledge a calling when it presents to you. Dr Gerry King’s involvement with Australian studio glass as a significant maker and teacher was ignited when circumstances took him to Alfred University (in western New York State), which along with Wisconsin was a seedbed for American contemporary glass. At Alfred University, Andrea Billeci introduced King to the possibilities of glass. Initially focussed on ceramics as a visual arts teacher in Australia, King always sees himself as an artist whose creativity is supported by both good design and strong craft. Underlying King’s meticulously work are cultural narratives. Over thirty-seven years King says his work evolved through the interplay of idea and image that utilised symbolism through form, colour and pattern exquisitely executed.
To the romantic what matters is that you create with all you have in you. Peter Minson came from an industrial background as an expert practitioner in glass scientific instrument making. Scientific glass was the Minson family’s business for three generations, and there, as Minson explained, it was a matter of “make that”,[9] rather than a concern for the aesthetics of the object. But Minson always wanted to make art, and willingly left the family business to do so. Carrying across his approach to glass from his earlier life, Minson loves technical problem solving: as demonstrated by his independent pioneer experimentation with small glass furnaces for art-making. In the communal spirit that characterises Australian studio glass Minson is always generous with his extensive technical knowledge and is always happy to share it with those who ask. Minson always had mastery over technique. His search centres on finding visual forms that are identifiably his own. His excellently executed functional items such as teapots, and his goblet commissions fall short of meeting his romantic concept of the ‘artist’. He continues his four-decade search for those unique visual forms that will give him artistic recognition.
Missionary Zeal
Romantic artists claimed the right to go their own way as individuals. They persist in their individual sensibilities for, above all, Romanticism values the primacy of will reflected in an ideal to which you commit yourself. For such an artist art is a vocation. In this you meet resistance and in overcoming this resistance you come to know yourself. Glass offered Klaus Moje that resistance. I am not saying Moje is a romantic artist, but characteristics of Romanticism do inform his actions. Such an artist must show a self-faith demonstrating a force of character. When Moje took up his new appointment in 1983 as head of the glass workshop at the School of Art, Australian National University, Canberra he was on a mission. Moje’s singular focus proved to be of great benefit – to him, to that specific glass workshop, and to Australian contemporary glass generally. The autobiographical character of an artist’s output can identify an artist as a romantic. So too can emotional conviction.[10] Moje output was subject of the show, Klaus Moje: Painting with Glass, a retrospective at the Museum of Art and Design in New York in 2009. This exhibition reflected thirty-years of Moje’s devotion to the beauty of a material. It shows the development of a voice that grows from small intimate bowls, to then move to glass panels that speak from the wall as complex patterned glass canvasses, and that finally shouts in huge glass areas of boldly ‘painted’ colour.
Moje brought “a vocational bent and almost missionary zeal”[11] to his stewardship the ANU glass workshop. Moje wanted his students to focus on the material in a balance of creativity and skill[12] that would develop as their own voice.[13] In his rigorous development of material skill and his exploration colour Moje could be seen as a classical modernist in the Bauhaus tradition. This could be interpreted another way. In his 2010 solo exhibition, Dance of Colours at the Sabbia Gallery, Sydney, Moje demonstrates he is a master of process, but this does not mean the material is mastered. Romanticism is evident in the unpredictable struggle with material, as an artist fights to translate imagination into substance. In this struggle a true conversation begins. A resolution of formal elements is achieved through Moje’s embodied skill and this takes us back into the romantic ancestry of modernism through the symbolists and what Henri Dorra identified as “musicality … the artist’s creation of the harmonious (or deliberately discordant) as well as expressive effects by line and colour, comparable to what the composer creates with rhythm and notes and a poet with prosody, ”[14] that is, through the aesthetics of pure form. Moje is using glass, and knowledge developed over a lifetime, like a virtuoso musician might use a favourite instrument.
A number of figures are responsible for establishing Australian studio glass culture. They are teachers who shared their artistic attitudes and technical processes within institutions and workshops. They created a context for Australian studio glass open to international influences while grounded in technical process. Processes are expanded by an experimental attitude centred on individual creativity. Australian glassmakers take from established traditions with what arts administrator Brian Parkes calls a “backyard-shed mentality”[15] – by which he implies they use what is available to them with staggering inventiveness.
Australian Glasswork as Interpretations of Landscape
In 1985 Jenny Zimmer wrote in a review of the first international touring exhibition of Australian and New Zealand studio glass that, “there was not one kangaroo, kookaburra or gumnut featured in the work”.[16] However, in an exhibition catalogue she observed that the landscape was still a preoccupation of Australasian glass artists.[17] The evocative nature of place plays a significant role in romanticism. Responses to landscape are still evident, and now as then, Australian imagery is intrinsic to some studio glasswork. At times Australian imagery is overtly explored,[18] but reference to place is also multivalent and appears in subtle and sophisticated abstractions.
In her painted glass, artist Summer Sanders reflects her culture and her family ties to country in western New South Wales. Sanders’ abstraction is anchored in the telling of the indigenous traditional stories she feels are embedded in the landscape. Cobi Cockburn “draws on native grasses for her colour palette and literal link to the land”.[19] Lisa Cahill writes of distilling “the essence of the harsh, dry landscape”.[20] Kirstie Rea talks of her love of the big blue sky as a clear thinking space, and of the Australian landscape pushing her horizontally (as reflected in her work), just as Clare Belfrage abstracts the lines on a eucalyptus tree into her glass forms in an attempt to capture the wonder that initially drew her attention to that aspect of the landscape. Belfrage writes that she seeks “a quiet rhythm found through intense repetition and the timelessness and restfulness found in detail”.[21] As Neville Assad-Salha said, these interpretations of landscape capture “aspects of nature that can resonate in everyone, even if it’s on a subliminal level”.[22] These examples reflect a refined development of process that engages the viewer with simulacra of Australian landscape – a merging of material and process to trigger aesthetic response through the same haunting qualities of form, space and light.
Identifying an Australian Studio Glass Style is Problematic
The works of these makers do reflect an intimate connection to landscape; however interpretations of landscape do not dominate glasswork in Australia and there is no other grand subject, or common language of visual forms that unites creative glasswork in this country (apart from the material itself). As is the case with Romanticism, individualism is dominant over any one theme or stylistic characteristic. It will be the work of the individual glass artist that is identifiable, rather than that the artist’s country of origin. A work is recognised as a ‘Moje’, or ‘Whiteley’, or a ‘Varga’, rather than ‘an Australian work’. Linked by their medium, there were (and are) many people working in many ways at the same time. Diversity in practice is unified by glass. As it is with romanticism, a linear history loses the subtlety and variation that makes up the background of Australian studio glass. Generalisation is usually a compromise. There are influences that may be traced back to institutional approaches to glass, but identifying these as stylistic markers characterising Australian studio glass is negated by the diversity of graduate work. Writing about the internationalism of studio glass in the early 1990s,[23] Susanne Frantz, then curator of twentieth-century glass with the Corning Museum of Glass, stated that while selecting works for the international New Glass Review it was almost impossible to discern any national, or regional styles. Bringing this into the present, Tina Oldknow, the current curator of modern glass at the Corning Museum of Glass, stated that Australian studio glass was not identifiable through particular national stylistic characteristics. [24]
The relatively small international community built around studio glass remains homogenous in its diversity. This apparent contradiction arises because the whole group is usually quickly aware of what any particular studio glassmaker is making. The desire to be recognised as a creative individual within that group means that, although technical innovations and work of other makers can be adapted, new works must evidence unique qualities. Adaptation must add aspects of originality if it is to be credited as authentic.
Romantic Individualism
Australian studio glass was pioneered by forceful personalities who willingly bound themselves to this material and its developing processes. Through role modelling, sharing and education that promoted individualised expression, these pioneers impacted strongly on those who followed. Within our community the strongly individualised forms that mark the work of these personalities intensified the tendency for an Australian glass piece to be engaged in relation to the field of studio glass, rather than within the broader field of contemporary art practice. This means that it is common for a studio glass piece to be read in relation to the work of other glass practitioners, that is, its comparative placement within the short history of international contemporary glass and beyond that, historic precursors in glass. A work is distinguished by its continuation of the technical signature and artistic gesture of its maker, and by its points of similarity to and difference from, the established signatures of others in the field. The points of difference are attributes pursued by makers. The ownership and recognition of the resultant mark of the maker is sought, and when it is achieved through some degree of aesthetic integrity, it is highly valued by all within both the international and Australian glass community.
The sharing nature of the glass community is balanced by the territorial nature of creative and commercial imperatives common to all visual arts promotion within the contemporary art market. A full-page advertisement in the first Craft Arts, October/December publication in 1984, which promoted Australian studio glassmaker Peter Crisp, by proclaiming that Crisp “brought to glass an originality of expression so often the preserve of his brush-wielding contemporaries”, was a logical outcome when technical mastery within one material is linked to creative individualism. Having ownership over their forms flows from a maker’s pride in his or her individual artistry and is common to all fields of artistic practice. In Romanticism it is the artist’s sensibility and emotional authenticity that confers validity onto a work.[25] These same qualities align a studio glasswork with Fine Art, rather than Craft practice. Contained within this ownership is the artist’s right to their own gesture, if not their technique.
History Reset
Much of the earliest Australian studio glass is primitive in technique and clumsy in form, and it relies on the quality of its medium to generate viewer engagement. Now the diversity within contemporary studio glass may allow it to be exhibited because it looks architectural, or woven, or a little bit ceramic, but isn’t. That is, some of the work being made creates curiosity and appears sophisticated, but it does not look like glass. Paradoxically it defies its connections because, although it is enabled by skill with material and process, these elements are not evidence of authentic contemporary practice, therefore the glass is presented as something else. That is, there are glassmakers who are looking to present their work in a way they feel will be accepted beyond their original community. This is not a bad thing. Richard Whiteley supports the few Australian studio glass artists who have made the leap into broader fine arts identities. It is goal he does not think we should all strive for, but he feels it does reflect a maturity and diversity amongst Australian glass practitioners.
In 1995 a former curator at the Corning Museum of Glass, William Warmus, wrote an essay called ‘The End?’.[26] He stated that the American studio glass movement was based in technological innovation and with techniques now mastered the movement is complete. Creative authenticity no longer rests in the material or in technical achievement. He argues that the dominant theme of studio glass concerns innovating the means in the method of studio glass, and now that means is refined and it is versatile. Warmus suggests in his essay that with their developed technique, it is time for glassmakers to explore the world through narratives. He argues that a methodology expressing this exploration through mastered technique is the way to renew energy in studio glass, which now sees some of its younger adherents (with aspirations directed elsewhere) showing their work in Fine Art contexts.
New from Old
There are elements of this assessment that in part explain our situation in Australia. As with its American precursor, the development of Australian studio glass is technically based. It develops as a sophisticated craft narrative expanded to accommodate individual aesthetic sensibilities expressing conceptual explorations in material, culture and identity. Technical process continues to provide the means for those explorations. As Australian practitioners, our developing skills, both adapted and invented, focus our glassmaking, and we are now recognised masters in techniques that we have invented or borrowed, refined and evolved.[27]
The force of our commitment to process has already been referenced in this paper as offering a productive future in design for some practitioners. Design will continue to provide a rich field for development, fulfilling briefs in built-for-purpose architectural glass, and in other types of functional glass.
Addressing Warmus’s suggestion in terms of future contemporary art, narrative always provided glass practice with a functioning epistemology.[28] Australian studio glass exhibits high skills-based competencies and a willingness to individually push the creative potential of glass. These qualities are always available for the deeper exploration of culture and self.
A brief review of two recent exhibitions exposes the fertile potential for studio glass in this country. Supported by highly competent technique and with their foundations firmly in glass as a means of romantic artistic expression, these exhibitions provide models ripe for continuing exploitation. The first was a group exhibition (sponsored by Artisan and Wagga Wagga Gallery in 2010) curated by Megan Bottari –‘Tour De Force: In Case of Emergency Break Glass’.
The exhibition’s methodology utilises material process to explore and articulate cultural references. The works are emotionally convincing, with one foot in language and the other in visual imagery as a means to tell stories. Although conceptually discursive, these works engage a powerful visceral response through the heterogeneity of visual representation. The epistemology utilises diverse cultural narratives expressed in object through the versatile materiality of glass. In the context of this exhibition glass is used in the presentation of ideas. These ideas expand the object as potential, and memory and expectation take us along the fragmenting paths of our contemporary culture. Themes incline to a quantitative Western aesthetic that describes and conveys the world as concept revealed through visual form.
Narrative is not the prerogative of glass alone. It is available to all media; however, glass demonstrates an impressive conceptual carrying capacity through its poetic potential and its representational availability as metaphor. The bond that artists represented in this exhibition have with glass is also strengthened, because, taking a line from Donald Kuspit’s book, The End of Art, they have the “craft necessary to create [formal] beauty as a dialectic counterbalance to their sometimes emotionally confronting subject matter”.[29]
The second exhibition, ‘Mind and Matter: Meditations on Immateriality’, Margot Osborne as curator (exhibited at the Jam Factory, Adelaide and Object Gallery, Sydney, 2010), also utilises highly developed material process, but the works in this show combine non-representational abstraction with the openness of ambiguity. This epistemology also expresses itself as object, but it is the materiality of glass, combined with light, that drives engagement with the works, and that engagement is meditative. This is nature as poetically revealed by artistic sensibility and it is exampled by our reaction to the materiality of glass. For the audience it is experienced as a sensation. The aesthetic is Eastern and qualitative as light dissolves form into formlessness and voids open, and presents us with the opportunity of experiencing the transcendental.
The approaches of both ‘Tour De Force’ and ‘Mind and Matter’ are romantic in that the intention is to engage us in a strong emotional response, not just reasoned appraisal. They play on perception, rather than concept in stimulating aesthetic experience within the phenomenon of their presentation, and their evaluation lies as a point along the line of our emotional engagement. As other exhibitions (Sabbia Gallery, 2009) by Kirstie Rea,‘In the Presence of Blue’ and Charles Butcher, ‘After the Object’ demonstrate, the aesthetic potential of visual form remains a rich seam for artists who chose glass as their medium.
While technical process dominates studio glass as a sophisticated craft narrative developed within the dialogue between glass and artist, the language of visual forms, identified with aspects of modernism, seems the natural home for studio glass. But this is misleading, for even glass artists strongly associated with modernist visual form are also guided by an individualism seeded in imagination, and their works are fed by the impact of colour and light and their felt responses to landscape. While Emma Varga may exploit traditional European craft skills in the sophisticated precision of her layered casting, at its centre her work is driven by a highly subjective internal vision.[30] Charles Butcher might push his forms to the demanding edge of what may appear to be a sophisticated minimalism, but he does this through an emotionally unrelenting psychological and physical commitment to his process and the resultant forms. Jessica Loughlin, with her technically highly refined works, may appear to be working towards a similar minimalist aesthetic, yet her works are simulacra of our landscape’s vastness. Using the materiality of glass and immaterial luminosity imparted to her work’s surface by light, Loughlin triggers psychological responses that allude to the sublime.
Romanticism is evident in approaches to Australian studio glass. The practitioners of Australian studio glass were always a diverse range of individuals more than willing to invent ways and push boundaries while using whatever resources are available to them. If artistic sensibility and glass synthesise within the numerous narrative fields available, the creative vein may continue to be highly productive.
[1] Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001,139.
[2] Cedar Prest, personal interview, 11/01/10, 2.
[3] Cummings became a significant figure in the international studio glass movement as an artist, technician, teacher and author.
[4] Keith Rowe, personal interview, 29/03/09, 2.
[5] Geoffrey Edwards, personal interview, 24/09/09, 2. There was on-going concern with ‘untitled sculptural forms’ that relied on process and material rather than strength of concept, sense of scale, or the scope of sculpture.
[6] Post-glass incorporates digital video in phenomenological experiments with glass technical process that challenge orthodox approaches to the studio glass object. It featured at the 2011 Ausglass conference in an exhibition curated by Anjali Srinivasan.
[7] Warren Langley, personal, interview, 31/08/09, 1.
[8] A major United States non-institutional glass school founded in 1971 to promote glass as a means of artistic expression.
[9] Peter Minson, personal interview, 20 and 23/02/09, 1.
[10] David Blayney Brown, Romanticism, London and New York: Phaidon, 2010, 179.
[11] Bill Brown, “Klaus Moje – Glass Artist”, ABC Radio National program, transcript posted on web 21 December, 2009, 3.
[12] Ibid. 4.
[13] Andrew Page, ‘Material Foundations: The Glass workshop at the Canberra School of Art reflects Klaus Moje’s deep respect for glass.’ The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly no. 98, New York: UrbanGlass Spring, 2005, 26.
[14] Henri Dorra, Symbolist Art Theories. A Critical Anthology, London: University of California Press, 1994, 3. References to musicality can also be found in personal interviews with Shane Fero, 14/01/09, 4 and Jeffery Hamilton, 25/03/09, 5.
[15] Brian Parkes, personal interview, 28/03/06, 4.
[16] Jenny Zimmer, ‘Glass from Australia’, Craft Arts no. 2, 1985, 105.
[17] Jenny Zimmer, Glass from Australia and New Zealand, catalogue, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 1984, 14.
[18] Examples can be found in Paddy Robinson’s Full Circle exhibition, Glass Artists’ Gallery 2010 (PR p. 2), Rish Gordon’s engraving, see in the Helen Crompton article, ‘Gordon Studio Glass’, Crafts Arts International no. 56, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2002, 49-50 and works such as the Snowy Mountain pieces by Holly Grace seen in Gordon Foulds’ article, ‘Holly Grace and the Scandinavian Aesthetic’, Craft Arts International no. 79, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2010, 54.
[19] Catrina Vignando, ‘Leaves of Glass New Work by Cobi Cockburn’, Craft Arts International no. 69, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2007, 53.
[20] Lisa Cahill, ‘Dry’, Ranamok catalogue. Ranamok Glass Prize, 2004, 18.
[21] Clare Belfrage, ‘Untitled’, Ranamok catalogue. Ranamok Glass Prize, 2002, 10.
[22] Neville Assad-Salha, ‘Place in Motion’, Craft Arts International no. 59, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 2003, 87.
[23] Ausglass Post Conference (Sydney) publication, 1991.
[24] In response to my question after her ‘Art and Alchemy’ lecture at Sydney College of the Arts, August 2010.
[25] Honour, Romanticism, 20.
[26] William Warmus, ‘The End?’, The Urban Glass Quarterly no. 60. New York: Urban Glass Contemporary Glass Center, 1995, 42-45.
[27] 25 Years of New Glass Review from the Corning Museum of Glass, in representing the international studio glass movement, has Australian glassmakers with 17 makers represented, ranking third in those numbers representing each of the twenty nine international cohorts, Australians were narrowly behind the United Kingdom with 20 makers represented but still far behind the United States with 105. A significant majority of these Australian makers were selected in the last ten years.
[28] Geoffrey Edwards, ‘4th National Studio Glass Exhibition’, Craft Arts International no. 15, Sydney: Craft Arts Pty Ltd, 1984, 105.
[29] Kuspit, The End of Art, 69, 185.
[30] Emma Varga, personal interview, 02/12/08, 12.
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