Annette Blair has been blowing, sculpting, carving, and painting glass for over 20 years—and now she’s exquisitely demonstrating this knowledge and experience in her first solo exhibition at Canberra Glassworks, Quietly Spoken.
Bringing together over 100 individual objects moulded from glass, the pieces include hardware tools, nails, paint cans, brushes, flower petals, leaves, and food. Arranged in clustered groups, these ordinary items resemble sculptural, suburban still life forms.
Many of these objects are inspired by those found around Blair’s house, in the sheds of her father and grandfather, or items from European still life paintings. Crafted with glass, their original function is rendered obsolete, ensuring they can be reconsidered with fresh eyes. “I’m really interested in how you can have relationships with these objects,” says Blair, “and how they can remind you of a time, place, or person to create a connection that goes beyond their utilitarian functions.”
This nostalgic interest in the history and memories of objects also extends to the inevitability of decay. In a testament to her technical skills, Blair bends, twists, and coats her objects in rust, as if they had been thrown away and left out in the elements. She paints bruises on fallen leaves, and carves away the body of an eaten apple.
Encapsulated in glass, these damaged and decayed objects become immortalised and remembered. “I like that while glass is seemingly very breakable, it’s also very permanent,” says Blair, “and in creating an object which might have originally been made out of a material like tin or wood in glass, I’m able to both celebrate and preserve it. I hope that viewers can engage with the works to build stories about them, and see them as the still lifes they are—little moments in time, preserved.”
Quietly Spoken
Annette Blair
Canberra Glassworks
15 June—14 August
This article was originally published in the July/August 2022 print edition of Art Guide Australia.
65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art is an extraordinary account of the unique art of this continent, published alongside a landmark exhibition at the Potter Museum of Art. Necessary and urgent, it tells the story of Indigenous Australian art; a new art history unlike anything we’ve seen. For Jane O’Sullivan, it’s a remarkable and must-read book.
In a new series of illustrated postcards available as a free gift with purchase only at the Art Guide Bookstore, Oslo Davis takes on classic and contemporary art terms and genres and reimagines what they could be referring to.
With so much to choose from, we’ve rounded up the major summer exhibitions in each capital city, open all summer long. Spanning Yayoi Kusama, Magritte, the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, and many more.
Symbols and images dance across Nathan Beard’s vast body of work, all connecting back to his Thai-Australian heritage. We step inside the artist’s studio space in Preston, Victoria, and discuss his upcoming exhibition at Sweet Pea Gallery.
Ahead of his major retrospective at Jan Murphy Gallery, Ben Quilty spoke with fellow painter Georgia Spain about wrestling with mythology, the contradictions of joy and suffering, and a belief in art as an antidote to an increasingly volatile world.
In her latest exhibition at THIS IS NO FANTASY, Ellen Dahl presents works from an ongoing photographic series that has captured many sites—from the Norwegian archipelago Svalbard to Tasmania—creating a dialogue between works that center place.
