Tegan Hamilton | 'Departed Heart, 2020' | 32x15x10cm

Code: MATH20001

Artist: Tegan Hamilton

Title: Departed Heart

Area: Melbourne, VIC

Medium: Blown And Sculpted Glass

Size: 32x15x10cm

Year: 2020

Tegan Hamilton's heart series, Tachycardia and Cardio, carries the instincts of her glass practice into bronze. Each piece begins as a form built by hand in clay, the chambers and vessels of the heart modelled with the same close attention to cavity, wall and surface that she brings to her natural-history glass work. The clay original is cast by the lost-wax method - a wax positive invested in ceramic shell, burnt out, and filled with molten bronze - before being cut free, chased and patinated. The result is presented as a specimen, precise and anatomical rather than decorative.

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.