TWO Canberra Region arts luminaries, glass artist Jennifer Kemarre Martiniello and glass artist/sculptor Scott Chaseling, are among six Australian glass and ceramic artists chosen by Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum for a group of commissions totalling $180,000 in value.

The Powerhouse Museum has commissioned six works across glass and ceramics to the value of $30,000 each.

The launch of the Willoughby Bequest 2020 Commissioning Program is part of a suite of new programs recently announced by the museum aimed at commissioning new works to build the collections.

The bequest honours the late Barry Willoughby, a Sydney collector of decorative arts, whose passion was not only for celebrating and rethinking sculpture and the vessel within glass and ceramic practice, but in engaging with the studio practice of artists.

Curator at the Powerhouse, Eva Czernis-Ryl, has selected Martiniello, Chaseling, glass artist Tim Edwards, and ceramic artists Renee So, Nicolette Johnson and Steve Harrison, to create new works that expand their current practice while the institution’s chief executive, Lisa Havilah says the museum would be deliberately placing new focus on to the practice of living artists.

It’s an “A”-list of artists, several of them are nationally and internationally-known.

One of the live-wires of the ACT arts scene, Martiniello, is a well-known Canberra glass artist, poet, writer and textile artist of Aboriginal (Arrernte), Chinese and Anglo-Celtic heritage who learnt her craft at the Canberra Glassworks as part of project she spearheaded called ”Indigi-glass”.

A graduate of the old Canberra School of Art, now ANU School of Art and Design, she founded and coordinated the ACT Indigenous Writers Group, received an ACT Creative Arts Fellow for Literature in 2003 and in 2011 was placed on an honour roll of 100 inspirational ACT women to mark the 100th Anniversary of International Women’s Day.

In 2013, she received the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award for her work, “Golden Brown Reeds Fish Trap” and her present-day work is inspired by traditional eel and fish traps, and coiled baskets by Kaurna, Ngarrinjerri, Gunditjmara, Arrernte and Northeast Arnhem land weavers.

Chaseling, who worked as a glass artist for years out of a studio at Pialligo, is the first Australian ever to participate in the exclusive 2019 Soneva Fushi Glass Residency held on a remote island in the Maldives. He won the 2017 Hindmarsh Prize for “Adrift”, a spectacular work made out of recycled wine bottles and cable ties.

A winner of the Gold Medal of the Bavarian State Prize in Germany, the Queen Elizabeth Silver Jubilee Award, his artwork is represented in the Museum Kunst Palast, Germany, the National Gallery of Australia and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan. He is a PhD candidate in sculpture at the ANU School of Art & Design.

More details of the Willoughby Bequest Commissions will be unveiled in late 2020.