DETAILS
Free, no booking required
Vitrine Gallery, Craft Victoria
Watson Place, Melbourne VIC, Australia
DATES
Thu 15 May 11am – 5pm
Fri 16 May 11am – 5pm
Sat 17 May 11am – 4pm
Tue 20 May 11am – 5pm
Wed 21 May 11am – 5pm
Thu 22 May 11am – 5pm
Fri 23 May 11am – 5pm
Sat 24 May 11am – 4pm
Speculative Future is an exhibition by Billy Crellin showcased in Craft’s Vitrine Gallery.
In Werner Herzog’s film Heart of Glass (Herz aus Glas), a 19th-century autarkic community descends into madness when its central element — the local glass factory — loses the recipe for its ruby-red glass with the passing of the factory chemist. This narrative resonates with contemporary concerns about how the old is rapidly eroded by the new, creating a sense of chaos in situations unbound by enduring truths.
Glass’s primal development was to mimic precious stones, assumingly introducing a disturbance to the perception and value of natural materials — a phenomenon akin to today’s synthetic diamond production. These new works contemplate glass as a faux stone, reflecting on the transitory nature of established material knowledge and the speculative trajectory of its future.
Using a furnace to recreate historical molten color recipes, the work captures pure color diffused through sculptural form, creating monolithic volumes of glass that embody both evolving possibilities of glass as a cultural material. In this Speculative Future, the works leave open questions about the ever-shifting material landscape
Participants
Billy Crellin
Driven by patient devotion to material ecology, new materialism and material afterlife, Billy Crellin’s practice occupies a new plane built upon histories of glass making, studio crafts and industrialisation. Crellin’s sculptural works transform raw earthly commodities into consumer objects, following a linear anthropology that ultimately returns them to natural processes. In its deceptive clarity, glass mimics the metamorphosis of stone, embodying a uniquely human interpretation of natural evolution. A trained production glassblower with a degree in visual arts, for over a decade he has worked across glass centres in Europe and Australia before establishing a studio in Melbourne (Naarm/Birrarung-ga). Crellin’s works are found in the collection of the city of Lommel, and he has held residencies at the Glazenhuis in Belgium