EXHIBITION DATES: 5 April – 8 June, 2024
OFFICIAL OPENING: Friday 5 April, 6pm
Paper Play Saturday 20 April 10am-1:30pm
Glass is a fluid medium that is constantly in a state of becoming. Louis Grant uses this material to speak of social and psychological spaces that can themselves be seen as ‘unstable compounds’. Moving outside of the conventions of studio glass, he produces works that are increasingly testing the relationships between glass and other materials. Often generated from personal narratives, Grant fashions oversensitive, hyper-fragile entities that are not so much fragile because they’re made of glass, but because of the emotional tumult they’re arranged in and by. ‘I know my age and I act like it’, is a reflection on the end of his 20’s. It recalls the melodramatic, nostalgic and often love sick times.
Paper Play with Louis Grant
Saturday 20 April 10am-1:30pm
Louis Grant will introduce his exhibition, its themes and the making of the work. Then move with him into the Art Room to explore a concept development process he uses in his own practice. You will imagine, create and play with colour, form and composition using various papers, cards, markers and stationery. The Paper Play methodology provides a visual reference and means for developing maquettes and concepts as well as for mixing materials, weights, opacities, patterns and forms in constructed compositions.
About the Artist
Louis Grant is an interdisciplinary early career artist based on Ngunnawal land (Canberra), whose practice focuses on glass as a main material to speak of a queer identity, notions of fluidity, instability, care and fragility. Firmly embedded in the technical understanding of glass (from undergrad studies in glass through to ongoing work at Canberra Glassworks and as a technical assistant to senior artists, and fabricating of the Australian of The Year awards at the Australian National University), Louis works to shift the positions within the discipline and the (traditionally largely masculinised) spaces of production, queering the medium and deviating from what is understood as ‘proper’ form and finish. His practice responds to the discipline of glass – taking the ‘mastery’ of traditional craft beyond a skill set into a subject position to speak of gender and power issues.
Listen to Louis
Camp performativity blown and cold-worked glass neon electronic-timer steel pain. Photo: Brenton-McGeachie
