By Callum Ludwig
Three artists out of Canberra Glassworks have brought their varying styles of works together for an exhibition at The Memo In Healesville.
‘CHARD’ brings together the works of NOT, Peter Nilsson and Luna Ryan and will be on display until Sunday 26 November.
Artist NOT said they all work in different types of glass.
“In the exhibition, there’s blown glass, cast glass, engraved glass, slumped glass, kiln formed glass, so it’s actually quite a very broad sort of overview of the glass practice,” they said.
“We all work quite closely together at the Canberra Glassworks and rely on each other; Peter’s very highly skilled in engraving and cold working, Luna is most probably Australia’s leading mould maker and cast glass artist and I’m more of a conceptual artist.”
The exhibition came together after Yarra Ranges Council’s Regional Exhibitions Officer Bronwyn Ward took a class at Canberra Glassworks.
NOT said they find it interesting how they’ve all created very different objects to a very specific theme.
“It’s funny how we all look at things differently and all come up with a very disparate look at things because Luna is very whimsical, Peter is more formal and I’m more conceptual,” they said.
“The starting point was Chard, which originally because of the wine district was about Chardonnay, but it became to be a about a shard of glass and a shard of memory,”
“One of the works I did was called Cellar Door and that was actually looking at the wine industry and the waste and cost to the environment because there was a world shortage of cork and now there’s one of sand.”
Peter used recycled TV screens for his works and NOT used uranium glass (which fascinatingly is still slightly radioactive).
NOT said it was a great opportunity and a fantastic space to exhibit.
“I’ve got family in Melbourne and that was one of the reasons I really pushed to have the show down there because they won’t come up to Canberra or Sydney to see it, so they were able to come up and see this, which was great,” they said.
“It was so great to have a show close to Melbourne and Bronwyn put the show together really, really well, her layout was amazing. It was a bit surprising because she’s very new but she did a very good job as the curator.”
