Magic name reflected in glass from Australia

The wide influence of the Pilchuk school of glass-making is on show in Auckland, reports PAT BASKETT.


Pilchuk is a magic word for glass artists, conferring status and credibility. It features in the CV of almost every exhibitor at Australian Glass 2000, the show of 15 major exponents of the medium at Masterworks' Customs St West gallery.

For more than 20 years, the Pilchuck Glass School, on Puget Sound outside Seattle, has been the ultimate destination for practitioners worldwide, including many from New Zealand. It originated in a summer school in 1971 which is described as the birth date of the American studio glass movement, and it grew to attract European artists who brought with them traditional expertise as well as contemporary practices.

Among the innovative techniques developed at the school is that of fusing sheets of glass - an extension of the method by which glass beads are made, with short lengths being chopped from a long rod of glass and fused in a kiln.

The most stunning example, Judi Elliott's Still Life , hangs on the wall at Masterworks and looks from a distance like an oil painting. The fused glass of different colours runs together like paint. Close up, splotches have the density of melted rock.

Elliott ranks among the most senior of Australian craftspeople, having begun her career as an apprentice potter in 1958. She eventually lectured in ceramics in Canberra but was seduced by glass and in 1985 did a diploma in the subject.

Three years later she made her pilgrimage to Pilchuk and since then has won many awards and exhibited her work in Europe and the United States.

Sheets of glass appear as laminations in two pieces by Canberra artist Claudia Borella, in which concentric rings of orange and green look like a bullseye - a reference to the Bullseye Glass Company in Portland which produces the materials.

Borella was a guest instructor at Whanganui Polytechnic's last summer-school workshop.

The work of another Canberra-based artist, Kirstie Rea, will also be familiar to followers of the craft in New Zealand. She was last year's artist-in-residence in Wanganui and was visiting lecturer in 1997-98. Her interest in glass started in 1976 and she has a bachelors degree in visual arts from Canberra.

She is known in Australia for her large-scale fused work but her exhibit at Masterworks is a smaller wedge of transparent glass into which she has inserted trees and features of the landscape. Her aim, she says, is to echo the horizontality and broadness of the Australian scene.

The extraordinary rocks and aridity of the outback feature in a large, blown vessel by Maureen Williams whose studio is in Melbourne and who visited Wanganui earlier this year. Her technique of painting onto the glass and refiring the work with a layer of clear glass gives the decoration an almost three-dimensional appearance.

Jane Cowie, who lectures at the University of South Australia, uses a technique called flame-working where a solid piece of glass is melted with a blow torch. The entwining limbs of her two figurative works express the fluidity of the medium in its molten state.

The cylindrical vessels of Scott Chaseling are described as fused, bullseye glass roll-ups because they are made by fusing several sheets of different-coloured glass which are then rolled into a cylinder and manipulated by blowing to complete their form. Their elaborate decoration, Chaseling explains, depicts vignettes of everyday experiences and moments in time.

The most highly priced item is a wall hanging by Brazilian-born Aseem Pereira whose career includes several years as a textile weaver and furniture designer and manufacturer.

Its price-tag of $7935 expresses the enormous intricacy of fusing hundreds of tiny lozenges of glass and attaching them with copper wire in a way that mimics the effects of weaving.

These collector's pieces were selected by Masterworks with the advice of Australian curators and New Zealand artists.