“. . . extends Grant’s investigation into queering glass . . .”
Despite a fruitful decade-long artistic relationship with glass, for Louis Grant, it was not love at first sight. Early in his studies at the Australian National University’s School of Art & Design, Grant was ambivalent about the medium. Over the course of his time there, Grant’s interest in glass grew as he came to understand its metaphoric potential to explore concepts of love, loss and queer identity.
“The scientific understanding of glass has changed since the time I was finishing university, which is really interesting to me,” says Grant. “Glass was seen as an amorphous liquid for a while, or an amorphous solid. Dr Jane Cook’s [former Chief Scientist at the Corning Museum of Glass] research considers glass as a solution. It’s rigid. It’s non-equilibrium. It’s frustrated and it’s disordered, which really resonates with ideas of queerness. It’s a very fluid kind of material.”
Wondering if I dodged a bullet or just lost the love of my life, 2024, to be repurposed into a new work for End to End
Photograph: Cassie Abraham
Courtesy the artist
End to End extends Grant’s investigation into queering glass, including other media such as textiles, wax, reclaimed terracotta and bronze. Grant is increasing the scale of his work – he wants it to take up space – and examining queer time theory, the concept that queer people’s lives don’t progress in the traditional linear sense.
Grant’s tendency to recycle, reclaim and reuse materials and parts of his work lends itself to the nonlinear nature of queer time. “I reuse a lot of work, either by melting it down or chopping it up, or turning existing work into other things,” says Grant. “I try to be mindful of my use of virgin material, and if I do use it, it feeds into my modular way of working which has always been about flexibility and fluidity. Multiple parts can have multiple lives.”
The artist with a work in progress for End to End
Photograph: Cassie Abraham
Courtesy the artist
Grant’s preference for reusing materials is innovative amongst glass artists. “Recycling is not widely used by glass artists,” says curator Consuelo Cavaniglia. “There is a perfection of the form which artists work for decades to refine. As soon as you recycle you lose control of that. It is quite a unique way of working.” Grant embraces that lack of control, retaining or even embellishing imperfections – bubbles in the glass or scratches on the surface; subtle nods to the hand of the artist which give Grant’s works an intriguing tactility.
Working from his studio at the Canberra Glassworks, Grant has an intimate knowledge of the gallery space, making End to End thoughtfully site-specific, more akin to an installation than a collection of individual works. A series of teardrops – a recurring motif of emotional turmoil in Grant’s practice – will be suspended in the Smokestack section of the gallery, hand blown and cold worked to a satin matte finish to capture the low light of the space.
The artist with a work in progress for End to End
Photograph: Cassie Abraham
Courtesy the artist
Another series of works are all derived from the same found mould, cast in various media, including beeswax and glass, a reference to the lost wax process. “Casting wax is very much a part of the process,” says Cavaniglia. “One of the things we want to draw out in End to End is the arc of the process. Where is the finishing point in a work?” In End to End, the process becomes a work of art itself, each regenerative object holding many identities and temporalities in a continuous cycle of making and remaking.
Sophia Halloway is an art critic and writer based in Kamberri/Canberra.
Canberra Glassworks
5 February to 26 April 2026
Australian Capital Territory
Originally published in print – Art Almanac, February 2026 issue, pp. 20–23
