Specimens for Keeping
I’ve been making small sculptures lately. They’re not particularly complicated... six clear glass test tubes, each about 20cm tall, with a little glass creature inside. But I love them.
The new pieces are called Specimens for Keeping, and they’re heading down to Christchurch for the Sculpture Show at The Arts Centre. They’re also the latest step in something I’ve been quietly exploring for a while now. The idea of glass as a vessel for holding onto things.
Last year, I made Tidal Reliquary, a group of five test tubes containing delicate glass seaweeds and tiny forms inspired by jellyfish and microscopic marine life. The proportions were deliberately somewhere between a laboratory specimen and a reliquary... objects made for looking closely at, but also for keeping.
That idea developed further with Three Sea Reliquaries, where I made three glass test tubes containing marine invertebrates. Those pieces were inspired by the life I’ve been noticing around the Tāmaki Estuary, particularly the small creatures that are easily overlooked. I spent quite a bit of time looking through citizen science observations of the estuary while I was making them, which made me even more aware of just how much is going on in the water around us.
Specimens for Keeping picks up that thread again, but this time I’ve stripped things back. Six clear test tubes containing imagined marine invertebrates in a lovely collection of blues.
The colours make them feel as though they’re suspended in water, even though they're sitting completely still... and then there are the tops. Each tube has a clear glass finial inspired by coastal seaweed. I really like the oddness of this. They’re recognisable as things from the sea, but translated into glass they become something slightly mysterious.
I’ve always been drawn to strange things that you could easily walk past without noticing, and that fascination turns up in my jewellery as well.
My Mermaid’s Purse Earrings were inspired by those wonderful little cases you sometimes find washed up on the beach. My Seaweed Earrings take the delicate, tangled forms of seaweed and translate them into glass, while my Bluebottle Earrings are inspired by those beautiful, translucent creatures that wash up along our beaches.
I think I’m probably always doing some version of the same thing... noticing something small and beautiful, becoming slightly obsessed with it, and then trying to work out how to make it in glass.
Specimens for Keeping will be shown at the Sculpture Show in Christchurch, alongside the work of artists from across Aotearoa. I’m looking forward to seeing these little pieces out of the studio and into a much bigger conversation about sculpture. And, as always, I’ll be interested to see which of them people want to keep.
