Tegan Hamilton | 'Butterfly, 2015' | 15x10x10cm

Code: MATH1501

Artist: Tegan Hamilton

Title: Butterfly

Area: Melbourne, VIC

Medium: Blown And Sculpted Glass

Size: 15x10x10cm

Year: 2015

Tegan Hamilton's natural-history glass works bring the discipline of the studio into close observation of the living world. Trained as a glassblower and sculptor, she has long used the body of molten and worked glass to hold still the forms of animals, insects and marine creatures, suspending them in a material that is itself alive with light. Her Butterfly pieces sit within this practice: specimens rendered in glass the way a naturalist might pin and frame them, but freed from the flat case and given volume, depth and the shifting clarity of a solid, hand-formed block.

Tegan Hamilton, born in 1985, is an Australian artist working in glass, painting and sculpture. She trained at Monash University, completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Glass) with Honours in 2007 and a Master of Fine Arts (Glass) in 2011, and has been an active member of both the Australian and Seattle studio glass communities, working alongside internationally recognised glass artists in Australia and abroad. Glass remains the discipline that shapes her eye: the blown and sculpted form, the behaviour of light through a body of material, and a precision of making that carries into her work on canvas and paper. Her subjects are drawn largely from the natural world, and from figuration handled with a sculptor's attention to volume and silhouette. She has exhibited throughout Australia and internationally, including several solo shows, the Talente exhibition in Germany in 2011 and the Corning Museum of Glass in New York in 2020, and has been featured in Craft Arts International. She has been shortlisted for the Art Gallery of Western Australia's Tom Malone Prize, the Ranamok Glass Prize, the Deakin Contemporary Small Sculpture Award and the Waterhouse Natural History Art Prize at the South Australian Museum. She is based in Melbourne.