Piet Mondrian(1872 - 1944)

Mondrian was a pioneer of abstraction whose 'signature' was the absolute harmony of straight lines and pure colours. I attempted to capture the spirit of his work in glass.

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867 - 1959)

When Frank Lloyd Wright described his coloured glass windows as light screens, he was trying to make a break from the pictorial and illustrative stained glass of his time. Their function was to allow the passage of light through some form of screen which included design elements. He chose the colour and shapes of his environment - mainly the prairie - because that was his environment. For this exhibition I made 2 tall cylindrical screens which are designed to have some natural or artificial light source behind them. These include design elements from the Australian marine environment - the lights and shadows and forms on a harbour at night and the red night sky respectively.

Leonard French (1928-)

The third light screen in the exhibition is inspired by 2 monumental works by Leonard French - the roof of the National Gallery Victoria and the windows in the National Library in Canberra. In these, French was interpreting celestial themes in dalle de verre - chunks of coloured glass in a black matrix. We have spent many days enjoying the windows at the National Library - especially in the Book Plate cafe - just watching the light play through his windows and also spent many hours lying on the floor of the National Gallery Victoria soaking in the magnificent ceiling.

Jigsaws

A bit of a personal statement. I wanted to make the point that the whole is so much more important and interesting than the component parts. I used to spend lots of time dissecting things and not enough appreciating them whole. These pieces are meant to show things being brought together - colours, shapes, textures, forms. Sometimes when we spend so much time taking things apart to see how they work, we miss the big picture. Becoming more and more knowledgeable about smaller and smaller pieces of the puzzle must inevitably lead to us knowing everything about nothing. I think we need to spend more time making the pieces fit together.

Leaves

I am really taken by the work of Impressionist painters - they seem to give life to their work through the use of light and generally this is most obvious when they paint trees and leaves. In these pieces I am trying to capture that feeling of light (in this case reflected) from pieces of glass (and in one case copper) encased within other glass in the colours and random shapes of leaves.

Shockwaves

I am always fascinated by the patterns from seismographs. It strikes me as quite perverse that such a small and artistic depiction is actually recording the death and destruction of a nuclear test or an earthquake. (These pieces were completed prior to the Asian tsunami disaster)

Rivers

I used to spend a lot of time flying - particularly in tropical areas - and from height it is quite apparent that rivers are what brings life - people live and organise themselves near waterways and catchments. There is strong imagery in waterways which I have attempted to capture in glass - flows and eddies, islands, little interfaces like beaches between water and land, etc. To me, the Australian continent is defined by its rivers - the flow of water which brings life to our parched world. It is no accident that water - rivers and lakes in particular - feature so often in indigenous art. I love flying over our tropical landscape and seeing the patterns and colours of the rivers and waterways, their flow and their interaction with landforms and, eventually, the ocean.