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Canberra Today 14°/17° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / Tension explored in Roberts’ glass work

“A group of four ‘Untitled knives [party knives]’ shows us a whimsical side of Roberts,” writes MEREDITH HINCHLIFFE.
A SMALL aspect of the work of the late Neil Roberts, a much-loved, highly respected and very much missed artist, is brought back in this exhibition. Essentially Neil Roberts’, “Chances with Glass”, explores tension, the tension between energy, its source and where it’s directed; the tension between violence and beauty; and the tension between the inherent violence of glass and its fragility.

Glass was one of his media, initially hot glass blowing. As his wife and exhibition co-curator Barbara Campbell states in her catalogue essay: “… something had shifted in Neil. His practice of ‘working’ glass in the hot shop had become one of working ‘with’ glass.”

He began to explore “… its will (yes will) to break,” she says.

But Roberts worked with so much more, often using glass as the expression of his ideas.

The exhibition shows several bodies of his wide-ranging practice. He collected found objects, especially discarded and seemingly worn out garden or farmyard tools and sporting equipment. An imposing feature in this show is “Ramp”, 2001. He rescued an old vaulting horse, a complex arrangement of metal rods with a worn and repaired canvas cushion. The work is erected on the wall so that the cushion faces the audience. Using a skylight designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in the Guggenheim Museum, New York as a starting point, he’s designed a veil placed directly above the cushion so one views the surface of the cushion through a web of leaded glass.

Although never an attendee at a boxing match, Roberts created a series of Untitled works “from The Ring Series”. Pieces of glass, many from second-hand car yards, were covered in a slurry of cement/BondCrete poured and sanded. He took cheap toner photocopies from old boxing magazines and transferred them to the surface. The energy is transferred from the fist of one boxer to the body of the other, leaving a negative space.

Another series in leaded clear glass represents the negative space between two boxers. Using photographs of “illegal” boxing manoeuvres from a book published in 1893 titled “Science of Boxing” show the tension between the two men. The leaded, clear glass evokes a drawing, the lead creating its own tension.

Although never an attendee at a boxing match, Roberts created a series of Untitled works “from The Ring Series”.
Knives often represent an emotion of fear and violence. The earliest pieces in this show are a series of knives, some with glass blades, and others with glass handles.  One has a beautifully cast handle, another an old, fragile, rusty bolt. One piece of glass slightly curved and perhaps also from a car window has been broken so it has the basic shape of a knife with a handle. Roberts knew no fear of the danger of broken glass and these works convey the tension in a profound manner.

“In Advance of a Broken Heart”.
A group of four “Untitled knives [party knives]” shows a whimsical side of Roberts. Brightly coloured paper, tin foil, plastic tiddly-wink buttons and wire have been adhered to the handle of each knife making them appear less menacing. These could be a nod to Louis Comfort Tiffany’s glass workshop.

Roberts rescued old, disused garden tools and used them, either in their worn entirety, or parts of them, in his work. A sinuous barley-twist “S” of clear glass, purchased from a homeless man on the streets of New York, is fixed into a broken garden hoe and is titled “Show (One Man’s Toil)”. In the centre of the foyer of the Glassworks, “In Advance of a Broken Heart” is a startling work juxtaposing an apparently useless shovel with fine, clear glass rods. The combination of old and worn with the shiny glass is graceful and gives both a new life – the result is more than the sum of two parts.

Neil Roberts’ intelligence, his inquiring mind and his willingness to take a chance are all on exhibit in this show. It reminds the community of what has gone and what it still has.

 

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