Consuelo Cavaniglia’s solo exhibition at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, seeing through you, began with a conversation about the Austrian-born Danish artist Lily Greenham. Her Study in visual perception (1962-67) was a simple optical experiment, with smalltiles of paper under coloured lights. Like Greenham, Cavaniglia has also been thinking about perception. Her recent glass works play with apertures, shadows, reflections and transparencies. Nothing is fixed, and how you experience things depends on where you stand. Her current exhibition takes this idea even further, leading viewers to consider their relationship to the museum as well.

Cavaniglia works out of a sunny studio in an industrial area of Sydney’s inner west but often travels to the Canberra Glassworks. In seeing through you, new works are set in dialogue with Greenham’s study, Martha Boto’s Diagonal labyrinth (1965), historical glass vessels, and an array of optical lenses and scientific instruments. The exhibition also flows out into the museum, with vinyl transfers on the glass balustrades and wall labels that elevated the voices of women working in the building. For a short period, there was also a coloured skylight that cast the museum in a new light.

Projects

Consuelo Cavaniglia: Working with a collection, you’re so aware of things being hidden, in the first instance, just because of the nature of the storage space. One of the first things I wanted to look at was the glass in the antiquities collection. Then I went through the lenses and optical instruments in the scientific collection. I was thinking about the idea of framing and how framing relates to perception. Lenses. Apertures. It’s about how you look, and what you look through. I was thinking, what if you were to look behind the walls and into the museum? Museums have complicated histories embedded in how they function. It’s difficult ground, and I think artists are great people to contest that.

Lily Greenham’s Study in visual perception led to thinking about other women artists in the collection also working with light and colour, there aren’t many. I wanted to include Martha Boto too, because of the way she thought about movement and things being in flux.

Earlier projects already had me thinking about being in conversation with other artists. Sometimes when I feel a bit lost, I listen to artists talk or look at their work, just to find my way again through their hands. Women artists and women’s voices, especially, bring me back to where I want to be and reset my thinking. But I was thinking about being in conversation with the people who were in the building too.

The cleaners, the maintenance staff, the security staff, the conservators, the people behind the scenes. The wall labels giving their perspectives became another device to frame the collection and the building and the space. I wanted something that was a question, or an invitation to look in a different way.

Process

Consuelo Cavaniglia:

I don’t want the question to be, how is it made? I want it to be, what does it do? I want to make the workings plain, more evident. Nothing is hidden.

Maybe it’s the state of the world but I’ve also been thinking a lot about the sustainability of my practice and how I deal with materials. At the Canberra Glassworks, where I make my glass work, they’ve got a box of offcuts under a table. I’ve been looking at the processes and going, well, this normally would have gone into a scrap pile, but it can be something else.

When I’ve been at the Canberra Glassworks, I’ve also found interesting glass that has been just sitting in their storage. Either people didn’t want the colour, or it’s an unknown entity. No one was sure how the glass would behave. Some of it is just incredible. For me, it’s a chance to try things, but it’s taken a little while to figure out. Now I’m starting to understand how to actually work with this glass. I’m starting to become a little bit more technical with handmade glass.

Place

Consuelo Cavaniglia:

We’re rebuilding the studio right now to put in better storage. We’ve got to do a clean out. I share the studio with Brendan Van Hek and often, a lot of the stuff we have in the studio ends up going to sydenham international, the experimental art space we run, to become supports for somebody else’s work. There’s a fluidity between the studio and syndenham international. I also want to have another look at a bunch of earlier glass stuff that didn’t work out. I make pretty strange things sometimes, because I’m trying things or I’m being a bit loose with process. When I go back to the Canberra Glassworks this year, I want to chop up or crush failed works, re-using them, and really lean into the texture. I just want to try things out. It’s often that fine line when something is maybe aesthetically challenging, but it kind of works too. I’ve been experimenting with firing pebbled frit [a type of ceramic glass] in the kiln.

I really like the fact that the sheets are so precarious and lacy and barely holding together. You can only just see through them. I’ve also been thinking about going back to some earlier tests I made with piles of very thin cut glass strips, building three dimensionally, and others where I used powdered glass to build texture. For my solo exhibition with STATION later this year, I’d also like to keep working with gilding and plate glass, which I have been using for many years, working with the quality of plate glass as a material that is both transparent and reflective. It allows you to look through and then look back at yourself as well.

Consuelo Cavaniglia: seeing through you
Chau Chak Wing Museum (Sydney/Eora)
On now—23 March