Tegan Hamilton | ''Tachycardia I', 2017' | 12x8x8cm

Code: MATH1703

Artist: Tegan Hamilton

Title: 'Tachycardia I'

Area: Melbourne, VIC

Medium: Cast Bronze

Size: 12x8x8cm

Year: 2017

'Tachycardia I' belongs to Tegan Hamilton's Tachycardia and Cardio series, a body of work in which the processes of her glass practice are carried into bronze. Each heart begins as a form modelled by hand in clay, built up chamber by chamber with the same attention to vessel and surface she brings to her natural-history glass. The clay original is cast by the traditional lost-wax method - a wax positive invested in a ceramic shell, burnt out and filled with molten bronze - then cut from its sprues, chased and patinated. The result is presented as a specimen, set upon a small turned-wood base in the manner of her kiln-worked glass pieces.

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.