In October 2023, Gundaroo-based artist Rosalind Lemoh was a resident at Canberra Glassworks. With much of her practice focused on recasting everyday items in concrete and steel, Lemoh’s initial goal was to experiment with the glass medium by casting objects for a series of stacked forms. The more she worked with glass, Lemoh came to realise, “heat and gravity were as much the materials as the glass itself”.

Lemoh’s new exhibition encompasses work produced at Glassworks, spanning sculpture, text-based pieces, and large floor works. The objects Lemoh chooses to create often connect to places and people, with much of her recent work referencing the industrial history of the Glassworks site. “There are snail shells from a garden and railway spikes that echo rural Australian aesthetics, labour, and the origins of the Glassworks building,” Lemoh says.

Exploring how gravity affects her chosen materials, Cascade Control, 2023, captures the shape of glass as it melts over a curved form. “By creating props within the kiln environment, the glass falls and gathers between states of what it once was and what it is becoming,” she says. Leaning into the stories and symbolism imbued within an object, Lemoh used the interior of an Australian military ammunition box as a cast to give shape to hidden internal spaces.

“The glass formed a kind of skin as it cooled against the metal mould and took on the quality of rippled water,” Lemoh explains. “Through the making process, I began to think about ideas of internal autonomy and exterior control, and the balance and tension between those two forces.”

Also playing on elements of arte povera, concrete poetry and natural history collections, Lemoh’s objects function as physical embodiments of memory, lending form to the unseen, and shedding light on the unique history an object can retain.

Told. Untold. Retold.
Rosalind Lemoh
Canberra Glassworks
7 March—28 April