Vicki Torr Emerging Artist Prize 2021

When I received the phone call I flushed pink with excitement. It feels amazing to have such good news after what feels like a really long dry spell. Hearing that Portal won the Vicki Torr prize this year made me buzz with energy and motivation.

Close up of Portal: The Closed Door during the Glass Armours Solo Exhibition, 2021

Portal will be the first of many in the jade series. Although I call it the jade series, it’s actually made of cast recycled glass; a process I’ve been experimenting and developing over the last couple of years.

Although glass is a beautiful material to work with there are so many areas/steps in the making of glass artworks that could create waste. So as I’ve learnt more about the process, I’ve become more in tune with ways to recycle/reuse material. Some of them involve crushing up one off moulds that have been fired and mixing them into fresh raw material for mould making. (A process I learnt from Dr. Angela Thwaites, who calls the new mix ludo.) And sometimes that involves looking around at the discarded and shattered glass lying around, and giving them a new life.

The last two years have really opened my eyes to the effects of climate change. As an artist working with cast glass I realize that it is impossible to be completely carbon neutral but I guess I want to make as much of a difference as I can, however little it may seem so this series is an important step in that direction for me.

Thank you to the Ausglass members for voting me in and keep a lookout for a new body of work!

Growing Part 1 - Facing Potential

It’s been a while since I updated my artist journal on here, I’ve had a few false starts that never made it to publication but I’m determined this entry will not be one of them. My last entry was a year and a half ago and as you would expect, a lot has happened since then! I had entered my first glass prize and cast my first crystal piece. I had reflected on my journey as an artist who had started off so lost and gradually crystallized into someone made of much tougher stuff. So sit back and enjoy, this is gonna be a long ride!

Where should I start? I’ll start where I left off, with sketching. I had undertaken a challenge to sketch a handful of portraits each week, most of them reproductions of old masters so I could glean insights off them - I had started the series for various reasons, I missed sketching and painting, I wanted to warm myself up for the Archibald (a prestigious portraiture prize in Australia) but there was also another motivation that I didn’t want to admit. I was getting scared of glass, of how much effort it took to make each piece, of how long it took for each piece to come out, of how little success I felt like I was getting in that area. And I was scared of all the ideas I had built in my head and all the work, all the work, all the work, they would take and no idea where to start it all. So I fell back on something that was easier and more familiar to me. (Not that sketching is easy, I had just been doing it a lot longer than I have glass and they were much quicker to resolve.)

In the end what made me go back to glass was a brief trip with my Mentor, Kate Baker, to Wagga Wagga, where I was helping her install her solo show at the National Glass Art Gallery. It was an intense five days of installation work with brief breaks to see the National Glass Collection upstairs. It was exhausting and exhilarating seeing how many different forms glass can take and the more we talked about it and all the work the other glass artists put in the more touched I felt but also the more confused I became. I began to question myself, whether I was really content with sketching and painting when I had access to a glass studio. Was it really the most I could make of my prime when I was still young and strong enough to take on the laborious work of glass. Whether I would have any regrets when I didn’t. And on the quiet 5 hrs drive back to Sydney, I had a vision of what I wanted to make - the first seed of Potential.

Potential 2018
Cast Spectrum Glass

Potential was to be my glass baby (in more sense than one, I actually carried the idea and nurtured it into being with the same term of time it would have taken someone to give birth to a real baby - a full 9 months).

Like most of my ideas, this one was also a personal test I gave myself - after my last fiasco with my grad piece Icarus (a story I have yet to tell, I’m still recovering from the trauma), and an aborted attempt at casting a large piece for a subset of the Persistence series, which both ended in kiln emergencies and serious anxiety - I hadn’t dared to cast with a quantity over 1kg of glass. But as time, experience and knowledge made me a little braver I felt it was time I tried again. Afterall, how do we grow if we don’t face our fears? And if Potential was about anything, it was most definitely about facing my fears.

I have a lot of ideas for my art (as I’m sure most artists do), as I’m making one piece inspiration comes for another - it can take shape in the different avenues of exploration for a concept or it could come in the shape of a mistake or problem I need to tackle. Most of my ideas greatly vary in form and sometimes even the techniques required to make them, but they all have one thing in common... they’re out of my current skill level. Haha.

The beauty of it is that it stops me from ever getting complacent and to always set my sights higher.

A hint of lips in the belly of the baby with her glass arms covering the eyes of the hidden face.

There’s a little secret in the baby, it’s a secret because most people aren’t aware of it until it’s pointed out and even then it’s hard to see in its murky depths. There’s a matured face in its belly - it’s a cast of my face. The baby in a sense is all of us when we’re faced with a challenge we’re not sure if we’re up to; young, uncertain, vulnerable and afraid - yet unknown to the potential swelling up inside us, of what we can grow to come. But the possibility is already there.

The plaster positive cast of my face within the belly of the baby pre-investment mould.

A juxtaposition of the positive and the negative figures in wax and plaster right before the investment mould for glass casting.

Opening night of the National Emerging Art Glass Prize exhibition in Wagga Wagga, the ‘birthplace‘ of Potential.

It truly felt like a turn of fate when after 9 months of loving labour, I was to see my baby in the public eye; right in the place of where I was originally inspired to create her.

It’s a been a long journey and I’ve learnt a lot from her, challenging myself further in terms of figurative sculpting, mould making and glass casting but I’ve also been taught that I still have a long way to go - I had yet to work with crystal and if I wanted that face/potential in the belly to be fully realised one day I was going to have to once again face another set of my fears in my artist life, which leads to the second part of my entry… :)

Persistence - The Strength behind the Beautiful

On the Opening night of Love Letter: Be With You , my Mum raised an interesting critique on my ballet slippers in the exhibition. (You can always rely on parents for that. Haha.) 

She asked: Why do the shoes appear to be so strong and borderline bulky? Why aren’t they more like the soft satin slippers that ballerinas use, elegant and exquisite – characteristics they’re known for portraying?
 

I wondered if anyone else had similar questions, so I decided to write up a more comprehensive context to the makings and concept behind the glass slippers.

For me, this is a work on the persistent strength of character. I’ve always seen ballet dancers as warriors, which I guess could be strange to think about at first but it’s more to do with their stoic attitude to physical pain and transformation of the mental limits into seemingly effortless grace. It’s also about the unseen struggle of the dancer who keeps silent about her pain to the audience. Ballet for me is an intensely feminine but strong type of art, it shows the mettle of feminine endurance.

I had made them out of glass, because glass has an indomitable and wild nature, especially during its casting stages. But there’s also an element of sensitivity and transparency and this is the effortless elegance that holds its spectators captive. When we see the finished product, we don’t see the weeks of effort that goes into each piece but only of the intrigue it presents itself in. That’s art. Beauty with Depth. But it’s a depth we can only feel.

Photo by Tyler Shields

I have included ribbons but excluded the feet. Even though it’s the physical body that keeps the shoes aloft and full of life, why is it missing? Is it just because it is more beautiful that way? Perhaps. But you would only be half right if you answered so. It’s because you never see the feet of the ballerinas on stage; you only see the soft satin that wraps like a medal around them. The slippers represent the prestige of being on stage, in the spotlight, in front of the audience. The slippers also represent what shields the audience from seeing what it took to get there. In a way, my shoes are trying to represent what is missing rather than what is there.                                                                                     

It’s a piece that depicts the struggle of the artist. Of any artist in any field. Because it is a battle for every artist to get there: on stage, in front of an audience. It is a battle to believe what you’re trying to do matters, to get up again every time you take a fall and it’s a process of saying, “This is not the end!”

The quiet before the opening. Dancers watching each other. Tension and energy in the air.

Photo taken on the Exhibition Opening Night by Mark Jones

I would like to thank everyone who came to the exhibition on the opening night and afterwards. It was truly a pleasure to meet all the new faces and get reacquainted with familiar ones. :)

I would also like to thank my Mum for inspiring further attention to the context of this series.

Each piece was developed to have its own character in the ribbons and colour scheme, allowing it to bring a different energy when it interacts with the rest of the “dancers”. Did you have a favourite?

Edit: Udee Online Magazine has done a feature on the Persistence series! It has been a pleasure getting to know Laura La Rosa (editor of Udee.) and talking more about the future of my artistic trajectory. 

Persistence 0 - The Humble Beginnings of Adopting the Artist Growth Mindset

This is just one of the stories behind the Persistence series of how it began and what I learnt from the process.

The series has empowered me by making me really adopt the practice makes perfect mindset; the growth mindset. The first glass cast was a complete failure, I had graduated from art school and hadn’t cast anything for at least half a year and my first cast Persistence 0, did not work

In my first mould the core was made out of paper pulp, which I was used to using while I was at art school. But while I was observing overnight the entire kiln started smoking. I knew it was because it was burning all the carbon out, however, I didn’t want to ruin the kiln. There was no more safety net of being a student and in my panic, before it had even reached 300°C, I took all the glass and mould out as fast as I could (once you take it out you can’t put it back in), everything cracked.

I was alone at 3am in the morning with a smoking and cracked mould, I was devastated! There were cinders everywhere, the studio was covered in cinders! I felt so bad for everyone around me because their work was covered in cinders too. And although Kate Banazi who works upstairs was really gracious about it and Kate Baker, my mentor, was really reassuring as well... I felt like a failure. The first one...the first cast had failed.

But the whole idea of Persistence and the reason why I named it that was to keep going, so I did keep going and made my second mould.

Aaand that didn’t quite work out either, the glass had started to leak when I checked it at top temperature. My stomach dropped and thoughts like ‘oh damn there is not enough glass to even cover the ribbons!’ raced through my mind. But, in the end when I had found the glass did, in fact, reach the ribbons it was just the tip that missed out. I was ok with that. I was just so happy that something came out! Later I managed to salvage it by creating a base especially for it.

Since then, I’ve been recording my process for each cast. Documenting the materials I use, the temperatures I go up to and how long I keep them there. Each time I find myself gaining more and more confidence and being bolder about experimentation. Each successive cast has added to my knowledge base and helped me improve my technique. I think I’m really getting to finesse that casting process of complex forms (there’s a future project on the horizon that I’m really excited about, which I’ll talk about in a later post).

I feel like I’ve grown into a person with more depth and confidence through this project. I’m not so willing to give up anymore. I used to have so many doubts about all sorts of things but all these failures have taught me that failing isn’t as scary as I thought it would be, in fact, they’re just obstacles and there are so many ways of getting through them.

It’s only a small bump and it’s not a slide straight to Hell (though it may feel like that at times). It’s even rewarding because you grow so much. I really love what I do. This process has developed me and given me a stronger outlook on life than I had before. I’m more willing and more proactive about how I approach problems.

Persistence I

Lesson: Not there yet, but we'll get there. :)
Recommendations: Read Mindset by Carol Dweck

Carbon Footprint

“The world before us is a postcard, and I imagine the story we are writing on it.”

— Mary E. Pearson

Carbon Footprint holds a special place in my heart for it was my first step into the glass world. 

For this project [The Hybrid] I chose the subjects: boots and postcards. The end product was a hybrid of the chosen subjects’ concepts and function.

The concept I’m exploring was inspired by a close friend of mine, who had gone off to Africa after months of depression, and the change in his perspective through his travels. What intrigued me was that while I understood the change and the experience on a cognitive level, there was a level of empathy that I could not reach. It was like walking in someone else’s shoes but they were ill fit because of the way my feet had grown through the life and genes that have shaped the present me. It made me reflect on the journal entries I had written during my travels and I realised that although I could certainly empathize more, a 100% connection was not reachable there either. And in the end, although these records (journals an postcards) can reach out to our imagination and take us off into another time and place, no matter how close fitting they are as we walk in these boots, they will never be perfect. The imprints we leave behind as we walk in them will be like Chinese whispers; lost and smudged in translation.

Possible future directions
 

The sculpture may become a moving glass boot with inscriptions of the postcard engraved on the sole of the shoe. The presentation will include it walking over a layer of sand and leaving faint imprints of the contents of the engraved postcard behind.
In regards to how the boots will move I have considered two options;
1. creating a mechanical foot that operates on kinetic energy
2. putting the glass boot on as one would an actual boot and walking in them.
(I think the latter option is more conducive to the concept but in terms of long term display, the former might be more functional.)
The materials I will be exploring is glass and ceramics. The reason I chose to cast the boot out of glass is both out of aesthetic and symbolic concerns. It draws a parallel from the Cinderella fable, where the glass shoe would fit no one perfectly except for Cinderella and this would be emphasized even more if I were to choose option 2 and put the boots on to walk in; making it transparent that I am not the original user of the shoes.
If I were to choose option 1, I would create the mechanical system in which the cogs would be ceramic. The reason I chose ceramics is once again for aesthetic and symbolic concerns; I find clay to be a suitable medium because of its tactile quality and the fact that it comes from the earth and its ability to harden into a bone like character.