Fireflow
National Gallery of Victoria’s Melbourne Design Week 2021.
Craft
26 March - 24 April 2021
Curator - Eliza Tiernan
Artists - Alexandra Hirst, Blanche Tilden, Jasmine Morgan Ryan, Holly Grace and Tim Edwards.
Fireflow brings together the work of five contemporary artists exploring the possibilities of glass as a versatile medium.
The exhibition presents the works of Alexandra Hirst (SA), Blanche Tilden (VIC), Jasmine Morgan Ryan (VIC) Holly Grace (VIC) and Tim Edwards (SA) and demonstrates new thinking and approaches to the centuries-old practice of glassmaking. Works exhibited show a mastery of materiality, process and technique alongside experimentations with form. Long-established methods are used alongside new technologies, forging future directions in the craft.
This exhibition is part of the National Gallery of Victoria’s Melbourne Design Week 2021.
Image - Jasmine Morgan Ryan, Atmosphere Extract: and your troubles, like bubbles will disappear, 2011-2021 (detail). Hand blown glass, dichroic, mirrored and silvered glass. Size - dimensions vary.
Work Presented -
Atmosphere Extract: and your troubles, like bubbles will disappear, 2011-2021.
Hand blown glass, dichroic, mirrored and silvered glass.
Size - dimensions vary.
Exhibition catalogue excerpt -
Jasmine Morgan Ryan’s practice focuses on understanding our intimate relationship to nature
and the universal connection it has to the cosmos. Working with glass, considered the ‘celebrated material hero’ of the scientific world, her work interrogates a view through the darker side of the lens, into anthropocentrism, examining its environmental impact.
Atmosphere Extract: and your troubles, like bubbles will disappear (2011-2021) raises questions regarding the alarming number of toxic gases ‘bubbling up’ in the Earth’s atmosphere. The work examines the fragility of the Earth’s atmosphere which in the current ecological climate appears constantly on the verge of collapse. Using NASA space technology, each blown glass bubble sits on a hand carved dichroic-lens. This material allows for the form to appear animated using reflected light
to change colour, depending on the angle on which it is viewed.
Constantly revealing new aspects of its interpretation
of form and space, the work references how scientific studies of nature give us a greater insight into the hidden molecular realms that support life on the edge of the visible world. With an underlying tension in the title of the work, there is a reminder to quantify ecological concerns.
Morgan Ryan’s work expresses a subversive undertone through mediums and techniques incorporating NASA- made and hand-blown glass, recycled materials, silk, aluminium, steel, porcelain, watercolour, photography, painting and installation. Morgan Ryan has collaborated with scientists from NASA, Melbourne University, and
the Earth Satellite Observing Centre. Her work has been exhibited widely including at Linden Centre for Contem- porary Art, Latrobe Regional Gallery, Craft Victoria, the Art Gallery of Western Australia and Cairns Regional Gal- lery, and has been awarded the Latrobe Regional Gallery Acquisitive Art Prize and Senini Prize from McClelland Gallery. Her work is held in private and public collections.
by Eliza Tiernan, curator CRAFT.
