FUSE Glass Prize Winners Announced 2022
JamFactory is thrilled to announce that the winner of the 2022 FUSE Glass Prize is New South Wales-based glass artist Matthew Curtis.
This biennial non-acquisitive prize for Australian and New Zealand glass artists is Australasia’s richest prize for glass. It provides a platform for artists to push themselves and their work to new limits and focuses public attention on the importance of glass as a medium for contemporary artistic expression.
The David Henshall Emerging Artist Prize, providing $2,500 cash and a professional development residency at JamFactory, was awarded to Sydney-based artist Bronte Cormican-Jones for her entry Sightlines, 2020.
Matthew Curtis
2022 FUSE Glass Prize Winner
Curtis is based in Queanbeyan, NSW at a home-studio where he and his partner Harriet Schwarzrock run a vibrant glassblowing studio and arts practice. As a visual artist with a material practice concerned with glass, Curtis is fascinated by the production of objects inspired by the minutia of architectural structures in nature. Having relished an informal apprenticeship in glassblowing whilst assisting at Denizen Glass in Sydney in the early 1990’s, Curtis has since exhibited extensively throughout Australia and regularly at international art fairs and exhibitions. Refining his eye for detail whilst expanding his material knowledge, Curtis has focused his practice on researching and experimenting unconventional approaches to extend his understanding of traditional techniques. Over the course of his career, Curtis has developed a rigorous approach to his work and his affinity, dexterity, and experience with manipulating glass is extensive. He is particularly interested in capturing a depth and complexity to the blown and cast glass components featured in his work, with the hues of transparent colours fading and gathering in intensity depending on the depth or delicate edge of the piece.
Judge Cobi Cockburn says “Matthew Curtis’s totemic sculptural work exudes a deep understanding of the material properties of glass and incorporates a variety of techniques. The piece holds light within while the brightness of colour and levels of translucency change and delight as you move around the form.”
Margin, 2022
blown tinted glass, carved, aluminium
560 x 150 x 740
Photo: Rob Little
Bronte Cormican-Jones
20202 David Henshall Emerging Artist Prize Winner
Bronte Cormican-Jones is an emerging contemporary visual artist and writer living and working in Sydney on the traditional lands of the Garrigal and Darramuragal people. She completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (majoring in Sculpture and English) at the University of Sydney’s Sydney College of the Arts in 2021 and is currently undertaking Honours in Visual Arts at the Sydney College of the Arts. In her visual arts practice, Cormican-Jones often explores the field of spatial practice through her sculptural works, installation, performance and documented works. She is drawn to glass and the industrial materials of steel, bricks and timber, and is interested in the way that these materials are used in architecture and the infrastructure of the world around us. With these interests as a foundation, Cormican-Jones understands glass as a material that frames our perception of and interaction with space: a transparent membrane from which windows, doors and (in contemporary architecture) walls are constructed. Cormican-Jones is particularly drawn to the ways in which glass can both hold and reflect light, with her current body of work exploring the way that we interact with our reflections in panes of glass.
Judge Brian Parkes said of Bronte’s work, “It is very rare to see such superb attention to detail from an artist so early in their career. But it is so absolutely critical to do so if you are going to work with a precise, minimal formal language… this work is exquisitely executed and its bodily scale gives it a captivating presence in space.”
Sightlines, 2021
cold-worked float glass, timber
1350 x 800 x 1600
Photo: Bronte Cormican-Jones and Remi Siciliano