As part of his 2022 residency, Sydney based artist Alex Seton was supported by Canberra Glassworks to produce nine new glass artworks for his exhibition EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT. 

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt”
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969

Created specially for the cells of The Lock-Up, Seton presented a series of glass chandeliers in tribute to those made by Newcastle’s discontinued Leonora Glassworks. Each piece riffs upon chandeliers that were ubiquitous in the entranceways of clubs and RSLs of post-World War II Australia and contemplate memory, forgetting, and loss with the passing of time.

The title of the show refers to Kurt Vonnegut’s singular anti-war novel about the fire bombing of Dresden that dislocates linear time. The founders of the Leonora glassworks started out making aircraft bomb-sights, but flourished when they moved into art glass.

These were shown at The Lock Up in Newcastle 2022, Melbourne Design Fair 2023 with Sullivan & Strumpf, and Sydney Contemporary at Carriageworks, 2023. 

Excerpt from catalogue essay

“Making a whole new body of work in glass for the first time, it’s hard to imagine the artist contending with a more contrary medium. One process is subtractive, the other additive. Using fire and breath to inflate a rod of molten glass into a hollow blown form versus employing the cool steel of a point chisel and the force of a hammer to fashion stone. But Seton was ably guided by master glassblowers Tom Rowney, Annette Blair and Katie Ann-Houghton during a residency at Canberra Glassworks.

The nine extraordinary new glass sculptures Seton has produced for The Lock-Up perform a type of time travel, summoning modernist ghosts. Each piece explicitly references a chandelier created by the Leonora Glassworks, though Seton’s research has revealed that none of the original pieces are still extant. The centrepiece of the exhibition, Trying to reinvent themselves and their universe, which illuminates the main gallery, is an homage to the chandeliers of the Australia New Zealand Bank Head Office in Sydney. The five alien lights appear to hover throughout the long, darkened space. From each copper fitting, eleven striated glass droplets cascade. The incongruous, anachronistic surrounds of The Lock-Up, originally the holding cells of a nineteenth century police station, remind us of Vonnegut’s prisoner of war camps. In the work Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt, installed in the Yard, 109 amber and clear diamond-point moulded glass pieces hover like a cloud above marble fragments, evoking ruined European capitals, prostrate beneath a shower of bombs.”

 

– Leigh Robb, curator of Contemporary Art, Art Gallery of South Australia