ON THE SHAPE OF LIQUID
(and the colour blue)
14-30 October 2022
Land St Gallery
6 Land St
Toowong
This project started out simply as an attempt to create a basic reference catalogue of interesting shapes to draw inspiration from when fabricating my glass vessels. I needed a stylised collection of interesting, minimal shapes to guide my designs in the medium of glass... This initial concept got away from me somewhat...
And so began my contemplation on the shape of liquid (and the colour blue).
I have always considered naturally occurring forms as a pure, honest artistic aesthetic and I started to explore the qualities of liquid to achieve naturally occurring organic shapes ‐ and as glass becomes a liquid when I’m ‘working it’, it made sense to explore a liquid application.
Through experimentation with pigment ink, motion and environmental manipulation, I uncovered some interesting effects and quickly slipped into a workspace where creative art and scientific discipline converged and a paradigm of random creative expression inside a tightly controlled setting slowly started to form.
I fabricated a custom drawing apparatus designed to exacerbate the unintentional, unforced behaviour of the liquid and I used an expressive drawing approach to achieve a randomised aesthetic.These prints present themselves on an almost unconscious level as character portraits; snapshots of random mutations that exhibit unique organic qualities ‐ each one with its own individual fingerprint. They are Rorschach‐esque mirrors created with as little human intervention possible and display a tidal patination caused by the gravitational ebb and flow within the containment of the liquids surface tension.
I used the “sublime aesthetic” of these floating organic machinations into three‐dimensional space and fabricated hand‐blown glass vessels inspired by these randomised liquid forms.