Reviewer: Meredith
Hinchliffe
Until May 26 at BILK, Palmerston Lane , Manuka. Autumn opening hours: Wednesdays to Saturdays,
11am to 5pm.
Glass artist Kirstie Rea is internationally
recognised and respected for her works in glass. For the past 24 years she has been developing
her practice and career, exhibiting widely in Australia and overseas.
Recently Kirstie spent some time in a
residency in Alberta
during mid-winter. The work on exhibit
at Bilk was informed by the residency and it sits well in the gallery, which is
not spacious.
Kirstie said: Travelling
out and about in Alberta ,
through snow and ice, watching a city function and flow each day as the sky
filled gently with snow. … A soft, solid pale blue sky lay persistently behind
the snow-laden clouds. The city and the
countryside had a different, softer, weather-beaten feel and look to their
surfaces [when compared with] the sun-worn Australian facades. Kirstie found a slow, pleasing rhythm to the
weather, enabling her to make sense of the differences.
The forms and their
colours are uncomplicated – pale, washed out blues, greys, a deep, dark red
that is almost faded black and occasionally a flash of brighter blue and simple
open cylinders, stacked one inside the other.
Some lie on their side while others are upright. The surfaces are streaked as though with
clouds, some preventing any penetration by the colour behind, while others are
pale with the light shining through. The
colours from the central cylinders break through the watery blue.
Several groupings of two
and three miniature forms are being shown in the shallow showcases on the walls. Larger groups are exhibited on plinths. Kirstie
has captured some of the sense she found in the series titled Rhythm. Rhythm 6
is a larger work – the cylinders are squat, their mouths relatively wide. Rhythm 2 is taller, the tallest – bright blue
– sits inside a slightly lower pale form which sits inside a deep red cylinder. The red is dark, almost menacing in
juxtaposition to the pale, almost washed and faded, blue. The grey cylinders – and there are only a few
– are also threatening and full of foreboding of more snow to come.
The bases or top edges of several works – both
small and larger – are cut away, revealing larger blocks of colour, framing the
surface beneath and adding dynamism to the forms.
First and foremost this exhibition is about
the landscape – the sky, the land and the environment in which Kirstie works, although
it shows a slightly different direction.
It is a quiet and contemplative, and evocative of the biting cold, windy
snow and the hibernation of winter.
Images:
Study 1 and Rhythm 2
Images:
Study 1 and Rhythm 2