It is not unusual for glass artists to create work that speaks about the breath, given the very nature of studio glass relies on the control and delicacy of the breath to create forms.
South Australian artist Gabriella Bisetto takes it a step further, however, with her new exhibition, First breath, last breath, everything in between, which is showing at JamFactory Adelaide. She uses the material of glass to explore the cycle of life, in particular the latter part of life – ageing and death.
Bisetto has always been interested in the nexus of science and art – something for which she received an Australia Council Rome Residency in 2009 to explore – and, yet, it remains so palpable in her work today.
Pulsating like a mantra for life, the show’s title greets viewers in neon as they entered a darkened gallery with black walls. The hang is minimal, and we feel a little confused at first. What are we looking at? But this is a quiet exhibition that begs us to slow down – to stop.
As we walk around the gallery, the pieces embrace the tech wizardry of glass in all its nuances as a medium. Bisetto seamlessly moves between lampworked, kiln-formed and cast glass to create these new pieces. And yet, looking at this body of work – drawn from Bisetto’s research of recent years – it is a poetic and delicate artistic journey that she presents, moving between the ephemerality of white cockatoo feathers and sagging mirrored surfaces, and earthy floor pieces that feel like flaked dead skin cells at steroid proportions.
In her 50s, Bisetto is interested in how the human body can be translated through glass practice. A great example is her Skin Series, which runs the length of the gallery. There reflective surfaces obfuscate our image, not unlike the carnival mirrors of Luna Park.
We are hardwired to peer into their pearly reflective surfaces to capture our own visage, and yet the varying surface tension, of blisters and pulled glass, interrupts the two-dimensional plane, reminding us that our image is a perpetual state of transformation, and that beauty can be found in the anomalies.
These sit together with a pair of mirrored kiln-formed glass ‘portraits’ set in metal frames – This skin I’m in #1 & 2 (2024). They are exquisite pieces, and seemly slump or melt in response to gravity.
These are not easy glass objects to make, and walking around the exhibition it’s easy to forget the technical prowess needed to deliver such objects.
Another major piece making up this minimal show is Evaporates until it disappears (2024, silver cast glass), a floor pieces that mimics puddles. But, unlike with a clear water surface, Bisetto has clouded and obscured the surface. She makes the link between a shared frustration of not viewing ourselves whole, with that of ageing, and the slow decay of our own bodily surface.
Her desire to translate scientific and biological understandings into visual outcomes – which can be felt and seen – has been a constant across her three-decade career. Those pieces have always been highly resolved, and pared back to the most elemental idea – not unlike a haiku.
After a number of years between shows, this exhibition takes it up a notch.
Completing the exhibition, at each of the gallery’s end walls are versions of the work The stars will always shine #1 & 2 (2024) – one an ephemeral piece, and the other an archival version (where the feathers are sealed in a frame).
Using cockatoo feathers, Bisetto picks up on the idea that feathers were used as medical aids to determine if someone was breathing (or not) by placing them under a person’s nose. As the viewer walks past these pieces, the soft shift in the air sends the feathers into a gentle dance. Each feather is held aloft by a rod of glass. It is so crazily delicate.
It was during walking herself that Bisetto collected the features over two years, again pointing to the durational nature of this exhibition’s theme, and that link of a cycle that is so tied to natural ebbs and flows, with our own existence.
Read: Exhibition review: Primavera 2024: Young Australian Artists, MCA
While the exhibition formally nods to the artistic genre of memento mori (meaning ‘remember that you must die’), unlike most artworks that play out this theme with skulls and decaying bounties, the minimal nature of Bisetto’s work rather allows space for the viewer’s contemplation rather than delivering a clichéd, foregone conclusion.
I think this is perhaps the high point of the exhibition – that we are all invited to pause to remember that we must die. It is not morbid. Indeed, it has a lightness and beauty to it, and is somewhat pragmatic. We don’t talk about death enough in Australian society, and the topics of ageing and ageism are still half-baked acknowledgments of rosy narratives.
This is a beautiful exhibition that allows those mature conversations to bubble up in a natural way.
Gabriella Bisetto: First breath, last breath, everything in between
JamFactory Adelaide
Presented in conjunction with Chihuly in the Botanic Garden.
26 September – 24 November 2024; free
Gabriella Bisetto is a Senior Lecturer at UniSA Creative, University of South Australia. This is the fifth in a series of biennial exhibitions presented in partnership between JamFactory and the University since 2015, and is accompanied by a monograph co-published with Wakefield Press.
