Feature.. Gathering Light
Gathering Light
As you slide open the small, heavily insulated door of a glassblowing furnace, you are immediately struck by the intense heat and light emanating from the molten glass within.
The first step in the glassblowing process is, in essence, an act of gathering light. It begins with carefully plunging the end of a hollow steel blowpipe into the furnace and just under the surface of the molten glass. The glassblower then turns the pipe steadily, to gather enough glowing viscous liquid on the end of the pipe to make the first small bubble.
Working with a small team of assistants, this initial ‘gather’ has been the starting point for each artist in the making of each glass piece in Gathering Light and how each of the thousands of individual glass components in the spectacular outdoor installations by Seattle-based artist Dale Chihuly also began.
Gathering Light is a major exhibition developed by JamFactory to coincide with Chihuly in the Botanic Garden. It showcases six leading South Australian artists, at varying stages of their careers, who each work in distinctive and exciting ways with the medium of hot blown glass. The exhibition marks half a century of glassblowing at JamFactory and celebrates the prominence of South Australian glass artists on the global stage as well as the many close links between the glass art communities of Adelaide and Seattle. Gathering Light is presented across JamFactory’s main galleries, where the landmark exhibition Chihuly Masterworks in Glass was exhibited in 2000 to record attendances.
In 1971 Dale Chihuly co-founded the Pilchuck Glass School about 80 kilometers north of Seattle. This most influential school is the largest, most comprehensive educational centre in the world for artists working with glass and offers intensive one-to-two-week residential sessions from April to September each year. JamFactory’s Glass Studio was set up just three years later by Sam Herman, who like Chihuly had been a student of Harvey Littleton – widely considered the earliest pioneer of the modern studio glass movement. JamFactory offers a deeply immersive two-year training program, which provides unparalleled access to glassblowing time and, since 2000, has regularly sent participants in the program to attend classes at the Pilchuck Glass School.
Adelaide is considered one of the major centres for glass art in the world and the six artists selected for this exhibition are part of a rich local glass art ecosystem. In comparing Australian and American works in glass, many commentators have noted the innovative technical experimentation inherent in so much of the Australian work, and particularly for those working in hot blown glass, a preoccupation with cold-working techniques to manipulate the glossy glass surface. The outstanding works in Gathering Light exemplify these characteristics and highlight why Adelaide glass artists are among the very best in the world.
Clare Belfrage
Clare Belfrage has maintained a distinguished arts practice for over 35 years. Her detailed and complex glass drawings on blown glass forms reflect the high-level skill and innovative approach to her craft that makes her one of Australia’s most renowned artists in this medium. Inspired by nature and its various rhythms and energies, Belfrage’s exquisite sculptural objects express her fine attention to detail, a fascination with pattern and rhythm and deep connection to the natural world.
Having graduated from Monash University in 1988, Belfrage moved to Adelaide to undertake the JamFactory Associate Program from 1991-92 and subsequently worked as Production Manager in JamFactory’s Glass Studio in 1996, when Nick Mount was Head of Studio. She was a founding member, along with Gabriella Bisetto, Deb Jones, Matt Larwood, and Barbara Jane Cowie, of the Blue Pony studio, which from 1997 to 2011 was something of an epicentre for leading South Australian glass artists, including many who continued to rely on the furnaces and hot glass facilities of JamFactory.
Belfrage has been an influential educator in glass, having lectured at Curtin University in Perth, Ohio State University in the United States and at the University of South Australia, where she is currently an Adjunct Professor. From 2009-13, Belfrage was also Creative Director of Canberra Glassworks.
Belfrage’s first visit to Seattle was in 1995 to be a teaching assistant for Richard Marquis and Nick Mount.
She has since returned in 1999 as a teaching assistant for Mount and then as a teacher in 2009 and 2012. She has also been a visiting artist at the Tacoma Museum of Glass and has shown regularly with the prestigious Traver Gallery since 2019, which also represents Dale Chihuly in Seattle.
In 2018 Belfrage was the featured artist for the 2018 SALA Festival and celebrated as JamFactory’s ICON artist through a major solo exhibition that toured nationally over three years. She has received several important awards including the inaugural FUSE Glass Prize in 2016 and the Tom Malone Glass Prize in 2005 and 2011. Belfrage’s work has been widely collected and is represented in major public collections throughout Australia, the USA and Europe including the Art Gallery of South Australia, the National Gallery of Australia, Corning Museum of Glass, USA, Tacoma Museum of Glass, USA, Ebeltoft Glass Museum, Denmark, Castello Sforzesco Museum, Italy and the Nijima Glass Museum, Japan.
Abstracting and interpreting details and textures from the natural environment – and sometimes those associated with traditional textile crafts – Belfrage’s work is highly distinctive for its sophisticated surface patterns and its delicate hand-polished satin finish. For an artist working exclusively in the fast, hot medium of blown glass, Belfrage works with an unusually slow and intricate process of drawing directly onto blown glass forms with spaghetti-thin canes of glass called ‘stringers’ or sometimes integrating painstakingly prefabricated patterned glass patches into the surface of the form – constantly reheating the piece to keep it at a workable temperature over an intense three to four-hour session.
Tim Edwards
Very few artists have more history and connections with JamFactory than Tim Edwards. He is still the only artist to have undertaken the JamFactory Associate Program twice – initially in the Ceramics Studio led by Stephen Bowers in 1992 and then in the Glass Studio led by Nick Mount in 1995-96. He has been a studio tenant and an artist in residence. He has been a regular hirer of the Glass Studio facilities and has featured in several significant exhibitions in JamFactory’s galleries. Most recently he has spent the last decade in the crucial role of Senior Studio Technician in the JamFactory Glass Studio.
Edwards is also one of the most nationally and internationally recognised Australian artists working in glass today. His works are held in the two most prestigious glass museums in the United States – the Corning Museum of Glass and the Museum of Glass, Tacoma – along with major Australian institutions including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Powerhouse Museum. Edwards has received numerous accolades with key highlights including the 2006 Rakow Commission from the Corning Museum of Glass and the 2022 Tom Malone Prize. In 2018 his work was included in the prestigious Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia.
Edwards has been a regular visitor to the United States over the past 20 years or so. He has attended the Pilchuck Glass School multiple times as an instructor, a teaching assistant and as a student. He has been a student at the Haystack School of Crafts, a Scholar in Residence at Ohio State University and a visiting artist at the Museum of Glass, Tacoma. Edwards is also represented by Traver Gallery in Seattle, alongside other leading international artists including his partner Clare Belfrage and Dale Chihuly.
Edwards’ works are generally blown and shaped in the hotshop and then cut, carved and ground using a lathe with diamond and stone wheels. For these cold-working techniques, the heavy glass pieces need to be held and moved carefully and constantly against the abrasive spinning wheel. The process is physically demanding and requires both skill and stamina – particularly for larger scale works.
For the works in Gathering Light, Edwards has drawn on his enduring fascination with the vessel – a form ubiquitous to the fields of glass and ceramics and our everyday domestic experience. The ‘idea’ of the vessel provides him with a motif, which he sketches incessantly often referencing the way objects are rendered in animated films, comics and graphic novels, to explore how we see and perceive things. The resulting sculptural works cleverly utilise the translucent qualities of glass to create subtle three-dimensional deceptions, where the actual vessel, created through the glassblowing process, is superimposed by the graphic representation of a vessel.
Liam Fleming
Liam Fleming’s passion for glass was first ignited in 1999 when, as a boy travelling with his family, he encountered a major exhibition of Dale Chihuly’s work at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Fleming was captivated with the scale, colour and sheer volume of work.
At the age of 16 he began learning the craft of glassblowing in the private Adelaide studio of Eamonn Vereker – sweeping floors and learning how to gather for feet and lip wraps – before commencing a Bachelor of Visual Arts at the University of South Australia where he majored in glass under the tutelage of accomplished glass artists Gabriella Bisetto, Jessica Loughlin and Kirstie Rea.
In 2012 Fleming secured a place in JamFactory’s two-year Associate Program alongside fellow South Australian Llewelyn Ash and George Agius from New Zealand. The program’s emphasis on training through production along with his willingness to put in long hours and assist many other artists saw his already significant technical skills advance rapidly. His interest in design in glass was also nurtured by then Head of Studio Karen Cunningham.
Fleming’s first engagement with the Pilchuck Glass School was in 2015 as a Teaching Assistant to Seattle-based artist Granite Calimpong. He has since returned to Pilchuck as a student in a class led by Fred Metz focused on furnace building and has participated in other residencies and demonstrations in India, Italy, Mexico and New Zealand.
Over the past decade Fleming has had a significant influence on the glass scene in Adelaide and has held various roles at JamFactory since 2015. During this time, he has supported and mentored dozens of glass blowers and has continued to assist several leading glass artists including Clare Belfrage, Nick Mount and Tim Edwards. At the end of 2024 Fleming will leave JamFactory to work with Tim Edwards and Nick Mount to expand the local studio glass ecology through a new studio initiative in the former Eamonn Vereker studio where his journey began.
Fleming has received numerous awards and accolades including the prestigious $50,000 Guildhouse Fellowship in 2021, which included a solo exhibition at the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Tom Malone Glass Prize in 2024. He has established a reputation as a leading contemporary artist working in glass and is now represented by one of Australia’s most respected contemporary art dealers, Tolarno Galleries in Melbourne. He has also worked collaboratively on furniture and lighting design projects with leading designers – most notably Jon Goulder for Milan Design Week and Dean Toepfer for Melbourne Design Week.
Constantly exploring the limits of traditional glass-working techniques, Fleming’s beguiling assemblages artfully express the unique material qualities of glass. His skillfully produced mould-blown forms are fused together in rhythmic compositions and then manipulated through a process of controlled demolition in a kiln fired to around 600 degrees, rendering them forever in a state of ‘becoming’. Subtlety different coldworking finishes are then applied to parts of the surface affecting the interplay of light and our reading of the form.
Nick Mount
Nick Mount was among the first generation of artists to be introduced to glassblowing in Australia in the early 1970s. Few, if any, have contributed more to the field in this country. He is in every sense a master of his craft and has produced outstanding and consistently innovative work across five decades. Mount is currently producing some of the most elegant and virtuosic work of his career – reflecting a life dedicated to continual refinement of hand-making skills.
In 1974 Mount met American glass artist Richard Marquis, who had been brought to Australia by the Australia Council to demonstrate glassblowing and advise on the establishment of glass courses. Marquis was one of two Americans to travel to Venini Fabrica in Venice in the late 1960s (Dale Chihuly in 1968 and Marquis the following year) to learn the then closely guarded Venetian glassblowing techniques. Mount, and his newly-wed wife Pauline, were engaged as assistants to Marquis and accompanied him on a demonstration tour of Victoria and Tasmania, thus beginning life-long friendships across the Pacific and a life in glass for Nick and Pauline Mount.
The Mounts subsequently set up a private hot glass studio in Victoria, before eventually relocating to Adelaide in 1984. Mount has always comfortably straddled the fields of art and design and his livelihood has always involved a combination of designing for production, undertaking bespoke commissions and creating more speculative exhibition work. When he was appointed as Head of JamFactory’s Glass Studio in 1994, he brought with him the work ethic and methodology he had successfully employed in his own studio (which at one time had up to 15 staff) to set a course which continues to strongly influence JamFactory’s operations today.
Mount has participated in countless exhibitions and has had work acquired by major public galleries around the world including the National Gallery of Australia, the Corning Museum of Glass, USA, and the Toyama Glass Art Museum, Japan. He has also worked with an extensive list of commission clients, including Rockford Wines, Penfolds and the Park Hyatt in Sydney. His award-winning Martini Set is in the collection of the Art Gallery of South Australia and his elongated wine decanter is iconic among wine connoisseurs across Australia and beyond.
Mount regularly exhibits and teaches in the United States and is Co-Chair of the Pilchuck Glass School’s International Council. Throughout 2024 he has been the External Mentor for Associates in JamFactory’s Glass Studio and currently works from a private studio in Kent Town, which he is reinvigorating with fellow exhibitors Tim Edwards and Liam Fleming.
The two major works Mount has created specifically for Gathering Light showcase his technical dexterity in the Venetian style, his eye for sculptural composition and his delight in the details that emerge from the processes of working with glass. This is the first time Mount has publicly exhibited these types of large-scale lighting works, which he has previously only produced as private commissions for clients as far away as the Philippines, Germany and the United States.
Kristel Britcher
Kristel Britcher has worked with glass since 2005, when she encountered glassblowing for the first time as part of her studies in Visual Arts at the University of South Australia. She completed her degree with first class honours and subsequently secured a place in the two-year Associate Program at JamFactory in 2010.
Britcher’s attention to detail, as well as her community-mindedness and extraordinary work ethic, led to her appointment in 2012 as Studio Manager in the JamFactory Glass Studio. In 2019 she was selected, amongst an international field of candidates, as the tenth Head of JamFactory’s Glass Studio since it was established in 1974. In her tenure so far, she has overseen significant growth and continued professionalisation of the Studio and has provided outstanding mentorship and guidance to the emerging artists undertaking the Associate Program. Two of these emerging artists are selected each year to travel to the United States – one to the Pilchick Glass School and one to the Corning Museum of Glass Studio – and Britcher manages these important international professional development opportunities.
Alongside her roles at JamFactory, Britcher has maintained a strong national presence as both an exhibiting glass artist and as a designer working with glass. She has received several important awards, including the Australian National University’s Procter Fellowship in 2015, and has been a finalist in important national prizes such as the Ranamok Glass Prize and the Tom Malone Prize. She has also undertaken international creative residencies at Vermont Studio Center in the United States, Vrij Glas in the Netherlands, Martin Stefanik Studio in the Czech Republic and Northlands Creative in Scotland. One of the earliest awards Britcher received was the Fleurieu Youth Art Prize in 2008, which enabled her to travel to the United States to attend the Glass Art Society Conference and to visit Chihuly Studio and meet Dale Chihuly in Seattle.
As a glass designer, Britcher has created several successful products, many of which she continues to produce by hand, with a small production team, to supply to appropriate retailers nationally. Design ideas often emerge from experimenting with techniques in the development of her exhibition pieces – particularly the slow and careful processes of cutting and forming glass after it has been blown.
Britcher’s practice is strongly material and process driven and reflects her deep interest in historical glass aesthetics and techniques.
She has extensively researched and undertaken specialist training in traditional Czech glass cutting techniques – an unusually distinctive preoccupation for a contemporary artist working with the immediacy of hot blown glass. In her work she references – though never attempts to replicate – various historical glass cutting processes as a consideration of the evolution of process.
In Gathering Light we see three outstanding composite works that feature blown and cut glass vessels carefully suspended within larger cut and stacked glass forms – creating a striking visual tension and pushing the structural limits of the material. In these works, we see the strength, versatility and timeless possibility of glass and how the past continues to influence the future of contemporary studio glass.
Jessica Murtagh
A rapidly rising star within the ranks of Australian glass artists, Jessica Murtagh has achieved significant accolades in the relatively early stages of her career. Following post-graduate study in marketing and around a decade of working in various roles across that industry, she became restless to pursue a more creative vocation and explored blacksmithing, jewellery, ceramics, winemaking and distilling before becoming immediately hooked on glass through a two-day class at Blue Dog Glass in Melbourne in 2017. Murtagh’s formal training in glass was through a Graduate Diploma from the University of South Australia, where she subsequently went on to complete a master’s degree in contemporary art in 2023. As a student in 2018 she attended a workshop at the Pilchuck Glass School (ironically run by then Adelaide-based artists and JamFactory alumni Lewis Batchelar and Madeline Prowd) and was due to return there on a scholarship in 2020 but was unable to attend as a result of the global COVID-19 pandemic.
In just a few years, Murtagh has exhibited in numerous prizes and exhibitions around Australia. In 2023 she was included in the wildly successful NGV Triennial at the National Gallery of Victoria as one of 120 artists, designers and collectives at the forefront of global contemporary practice. She was also awarded second prize in the inaugural MAKE Award, established by the Australian Design Centre in 2023 as the richest prize for contemporary craft and design in Australia. Her work has already been acquired by several prominent public galleries in Australia including the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the Parliament House Art Collection, Canberra.
Murtagh is a regular hirer of the facilities of the JamFactory Glass Studio where, like Chihuly (despite being a proficient glassblower herself), she regularly directs and assists a trusted team of specialists to produce large-scale blanks to demanding technical specifications. For the pieces in Gathering Light, with their translucent layer of blue on the inside and opaque layer of white on the outside, she has worked with exceptionally skilled gaffers and JamFactory alumni Marcel Hoogstad Hay and Drew Spangenberg.
Murtagh’s arts practice leans heavily on illustration, using sand-carving and engraving techniques associated with traditional cameo glass to create imagery and narratives on glass. She draws inspiration from classical artefacts and antiquities, such as those of the ancient Athenians, contrasted with contemporary themes and the mundane trials and tribulations of everyday life in the modern world. In her work, Murtagh combines historical tropes with contemporary narratives as well as historical and contemporary techniques. Glassblowing and cameo-glass engraving are ancient crafts, but Murtagh also utilises Adobe software, computer cut stencils and industrial sandblasting as aids in the production of her works which are beautifully layered – in every sense.
Gathering Light is showing at JamFactory Gallery One from 6 December 2024 – 30 March 2025.
The exhibition has been curated by Brian Parkes. Project funding has been provided by the South Australian Government through Arts South Australia and by Jim and Helen Carreker through Foundation SA.