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.
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 Naarm/Melbourne Australia. Crellin’s works are found in the collection of the city of Lommel, and he has held residencies at the Glazenhuis in Belgium.
Glass