Front Gallery, 10th–28th June 2009

Increasingly New Zealand glass artists are pushing the boundaries of traditional formats and perceptions about the limitations of their media. The six glass artists in Verre boldly embrace the beauty of glass, remaining uncompromised by its conventional fragility or rigidity. Function is dismissed or questioned and attention is focused drawn towards composition, scale and the substance of glass as pure sculptural form.

Lee Brogan’s glass sculptures are environmentally and politically inspired. She was the winner of the Molly Morpeth Canaday Glass award and a finalist in the Wallace Art Award in 2008.

Crystal Chain Gang consists of the collaborative team Leanne Williams and Jim Dennison, who with their respective backgrounds in installation and glass, find a perfect synergy in completing large scale sculptural glass works.

Rachel Ravenscroft works in kiln-formed glass, exploring aspects of the New Zealand landscape and its geology through repeated forms, the use of light and texture. She has been a finalist in the Ranamok Contemporary Glass Art Prize in 2006, 2004 and 2003.

Colleen Ryan-Priest has worked in kiln-cast glass for the past 10 years. She is specifically drawn to the transparency and refractive qualities of glass, providing a multi-faceted view into and beyond the ‘surface’.

Di Tocker received her BFA in glass from the RMIT Melbourne in 2002. In her current series of ‘paper people’, she comments; “….I play again, with the delicate nature of glass, colour, reflection and spatial relationships.”