Worker in Progress

7:28 am or pm?

It has been a busy time in and out of the studio.

I have been spending most of my days over the last couple of months filling in as the Technical Officer at the ANU Glass workshop. It was a challenge and a pleasure to help out at the school.

Beyond this, it is now coming up on summer down here and I have been working late (and early) in order to complete several studio projects and personal artwork. In the midst of this activity, I was awarded a generous CAPO grant (The 2014 Canberra Weekly Award) to further the ability of our studio by affording the purchase of a new tile saw. Here are some scenes of recent highlights...

As for my personal work, I constructed a handful of works from two new series for SOFA Chicago 2014. This new work will be shown with Beaver Galleries and hopefully all of it will find good homes during the show.

One of the new series is called the Parcel Series.

These works look to connect two seemingly separate connotations of the word “parcel”. The first idea explores a “parcel” as something you would send/receive and the other refers to a specific piece of land.

Upon first glance, these solid glass blocks have been fused and formed into the shape of a transparent and wrapped shipping package. The address labels of each package have been polished to clearly reveal the content of the bundle while also attempting to subtly and perceptually connect the separate physical positions of its sender/receiver with their shared view of the shipped form’s single subject.

By looking into a block, a single hand drawn image of a patch of land can be seen. In particular, each block holds a scene of a liminal area of activity that would connect, expedite, deliver or drain the flow of possibilities for the places that they exist between.

Here is a look at their construction and final form:

The other new series that I will be sending to Chicago is called the Segment Series.

The Segment Series is a look at the idea of shipping containers and the componentry of their individual and collected constructs.

Each work in this series is made of separate flat fused geometric components that are made to mimic the shape and stack-ability of the common shipping container. Being glass, the interior of each component is visible and holds within it a possible scene of the container’s journey.

The singular title of each work (ie. One and Four) is meant to allude to a number of possible destinations of denotation. The one title could refer to:

-the number that the representative containers are in the total count of cargo,
-the time of day when the scene held within each form is occurring or perhaps
-the current step that each container is at in advancement towards the successful delivery of its shipment…

With these few things accomplished, it is now time to enjoy the spring by getting back in the studio to complete some commissions, studio infrastructure projects and exhibition work. More soon...