Audiences ponder intriguing art exhibitions built around use of light

Attendees at South East Centre for Contemporary Art (SECCA) on Friday, February 16 pondered the meaning behind the work of two artists, with the launch of a duo-exhibition.

"That's Tathra beach in a fog," one gentleman said as he pointed to a glass artwork, before another chimed in, "It's the sea mist after a crashing wave," while gallery director Iain Dawson thought it was a snow storm. Each artwork mystified viewers.

Aimee Frodsham, artistic director of Canberra Glassworks and friend to Jessica Loughlin for 28 years, spoke about and opened the 'Of Light' exhibition, providing insight to how some of the artworks were created.

"Jessica is a kiln-former, so she uses sheet glass in the kiln and she combines colour and light by layering glass and firing it and melting it together, and then cutting the glass back to get to get the form," Ms Frodsham said.

Using a water-fed angle grinder with diamond shaping tool, Loughlin works the surface of her glass pieces similar to a car polishing tool, while other works involved sprinkling ground-up glass pigment over panes and using water to wash and form patterns before firing.

"The qualities of opaline glass are that the glass can fragment the light waves as it comes through, so these pieces look blue but they're actually not," Ms Frodsham said.

"Because it's up against the wall, what this glass does is it reflects the cool tones and it absorbs the warm tones...it's just magic, it can pull apart light waves."

Queer photographic artist and costume maker, Gerwyn Davies was both creator and somewhat anonymous subject of his pieces with each figure being masked, yet his tattooed features ever-present in the colour of his inked arms and legs.

"I'll set up the set and the lighting and I'll test the lighting by hopping in and out of the frame and taking photographs, once I'm happy with all that, I set the camera up to fire and just let it go [like a timelapse]," Davies said, "For each image, I'll take hundreds of photographs."

"There's a lot of manicuring that goes on after it as well, shining the image and making it really kind of plastic," Davies said.

He said when taking photographs it was often the first time he had put the costume on to see what it looked like, making adjustments and learning how it sat, and what angles he deemed more photogenic.

His oversized headpieces were made from sports mesh and shaped foam cuttings, and "are all hard to breathe in," and "really disgusting to wear" because they were not lined making them scratchy on the skin, and sweat-inducing.

"I was making costumes and shooting them on someone else and their face was revealed in all of them, and it became really unpractical and testing the friendship a bit, calling her up and making her wear this horrible thing, so I started shooting myself," he said.

"Part of that, I didn't want to take photographs of myself kind or pouting and pulling faces, and [over time the masks] became more and more central to it, disguising, disappearing, but it began as something [as] a practical thing to work in the studio."