Maree Clarke, In the Flicker of Light, 2024
a solo show of glass works by Maree Clarke
shown at Vivian Anderson Gallery, Melbourne
26 June to 27 July 2024
In the Flicker of Light is a new series in glass by internationally-renowned First Nations artist, Maree Clarke (Mutti Mutti/Wamba Wamba/Yorta Yorta/Boonwurrung) for Vivian Anderson Gallery, Melbourne.
This series is the artist’s most ambitious glass project to date with work developed through a culmination of residencies across the State of Washington, USA and Canberra, Australia. This unparalleled exhibition is an in-depth exploration of the medium of glass and its seemingly endless possibilities in re-thinking and re-presenting cultural materials and objects in transfixing new ways.
Maree Clarke recieved the esteemed $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Urban Sculpture in 2023 to facilitate the production of the hero work for this exhibition – a 3 metre-long canoe comprised of 20 suspended glass sections patterned with microscopic river reeds in Murrini glass.
Commissioned by: Maree Clarke for Vivian Anderson Gallery
Materials: Hot sculpted glass, fused & polished murrini glass,
hand cut & finished, blown murrini glass.
Project completed: 2024
These beautiful sculptural objects speak of the fragility of Indigenous knowledge and ways of being and of the extraordinary power and resilience of First Nations culture. Like the chimerical nature of glass, Clarke remains open and receptive to a kind of imaginative shapeshifting within her work, and it is from this ability and practice that she so ably facilitates a continuation of cultural stories and memory.
In ‘In the flicker of light’, Clarke concentrates entirely on this [glass] medium – calling upon the extraordinary depth of knowledge developed through her years of studying historical cultural material in museum collections and archives to envisage a new body of work that recreates cultural artefacts in glass.
Kelly Gellatly
arts writer and exhibition essay author