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!

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.