Nancy Callan & Mel Douglas
RESIDENCY
01 MAY -> 20 MAY 2023
EXHIBITION
22 MAY -> 31 AUGUST 2023
OPENING & PERFORMANCES
SATURDAY 20 MAY 2023 - 4:00
Hosted at the Centre du Verre Contemporain for a residency in May, Nancy Callan (Seattle, USA) & Mel Douglas (Canberra, Australia) are two of the most innovative artists working in glass today. The duo collaborates to create objects celebrating the relationship between form, pattern, balance, and design.
NANCY CALLAN
Nancy Callan borrows from nature many of its remarkable patterns: a spider's web, the vein of a leaf, the texture of ice. Observing these delicate fragments connects her deeply to elemental life forces. Callan considers herself a collector of visual data that she transcribes into glass language. Each detail can become an avenue of exploration in its own right, and the finished work is often far beyond its source of inspiration.
Trained in Venetian glass traditions, Callan developed her language from the vocabulary formed by historical glass processes such as filigrane, incalmo and murrine.
Callan attended the Massachusetts College of Art (BFA 1996) and lives in Seattle, Wash. She was also a key member of maestro Lino Tagliapietra’s glassblowing team for 19 years. Her numerous awards include the Creative Glass Center of America Fellowship and residencies at the Museum of Glass (Tacoma, WA), The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH, the Pittsburgh Glass Center, Pittsburgh, PA, and The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA. She has offered advanced glassblowing workshops at the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, WA, the Pittsburgh Glass Center, Haystack Mountain School in Deer Isle, ME and Penland School of Crafts in Ashville, NC.
Her work can be found in the permanent collections of
the Shanghai Museum of Art, Shanghai, China, the Museum of Glass, Tacoma, WA,
the Museum of Glass, Corning, NY,
the Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, MI,
the Museum of Northwest Art, La Connor, WA,
as well as in numerous private collections.
MEL DOUGLAS
Throughout her career, Douglas has pursued work that has been praised as ‘quiet, but strangely energetic and animated’ and as evidence of ‘her commitment to creative experimentation and evolution with the always challenging medium of glass.’
Robert Cook, AGWA’s Curator of 20th Century Art, Art Gallery of Western Australia
Douglas' minimalist aesthetic probes the creative possibilities of volume and line, where the form is not a medium for drawing but a three-dimensional design itself. Using the unique qualities of glass and its rich mark-making potential, Douglas uses lines to inform, define and enable three-dimensional space.
Mel Douglas has worked as an independent studio artist since 2000. In 2020 Douglas was awarded her Ph.D. from the Australian National University for practice-led research investigating how studio glass can be understood through the aesthetics of drawing.
In addition to winning the 2020 and 2014 Tom Malone Prize, Douglas has received several major awards, including the Ranamok Glass Prize in 2002 and the International Young Glass Award in 2007 from Ebeltolft. In 2021 she was selected as the Art Group Creative Fellow at the Canberra Glassworks.
In 2019 her work was the inaugural acquisition for the NGA’s Robert and Eugenie Bell Decorative Arts and Design Fund.
Douglas’ work is held in private collections and public institutions internationally, including:
the Corning Museum of Glass, New York,
the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA,
the Ebeltoft Museum of Glass, Denmark,
and National Gallery of Australia, Australia.