The Cube: Alex Seton

In his latest exhibition ‘And Nothing Hurt..’ sculptor Alex Seton revisits his series of glass installations created at The Canberra Glassworks. Each piece riffs upon chandeliers that were ubiquitous in the entranceways of clubs and RSLs of post-World War II Australia.

The works are made in tribute to those made by Newcastle’s discontinued Leonora Glassworks. These pieces contemplate memory, forgetting, and loss with the passing of time.

Glass exists in its own special state of matter – it is a solid produced by cooling molten material that still holds its liquid memory. Seton pivots from the layered geological time evident in his favoured material of marble for this frozen moment in glass.

“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt”
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969

The title of the show refers to Kurt Vonnegut’s singular anti-war novel about the fire bombing of Dresden that dislocates linear time. The founders of the Leonora glassworks started out making aircraft bomb-sights, but flourished when they moved into art glass, becoming part of Australian cultural life and testament to post-war healing.

These works were produced on artist-in-residency at Canberra Glassworks. The artist would like to thank master glassblowers Tom Rowney, Annette Blair and Katie Ann-Houghton.

First shown in ‘Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt..’ 2022, at The Lockup Art Space, Newcastle, and developed with the assistance of Create NSW, Newcastle Museum and University of Newcastle.