Regional Gallery to host award-winning glass sculptor Clare Belfrage

6 November 2020

Bega Valley Regional Gallery is proud to host multi award-winning glass sculptor, Clare Belfrage who’s national and international career spans almost three decades.

“Clare Belfrage is a JamFactory icon who has forged an international reputation for her finely detailed glass sculptures that marry organic blown forms with intricate line work,” Gallery Director, Iain Dawson said.

“South Australia’s JamFactory is a unique not-for-profit cultural organisation that has supported and promoted outstanding Australian design and craftsmanship for almost 50 years.

“During her career, Belfrage has maintained a vibrant studio glass practice and is known for her distinctive artworks, inspired by the repetitious patterns found in nature and the woven lines of textiles.

“She is particularly drawn to the layered rhythms that mark growth, change and the passing of time in the natural world.”

“When creating my artworks, I am definitely thinking of the building up of pattern, line by line, one small element applied at a time, slowly creating a tempo,” Ms Belfrage says.

“It is clearly different to the accumulative process in nature, yet somehow reminiscent, and I think the flow of making is captured within the final object.”

The characteristically fluid lines found throughout Belfrage’s works are part of a technical breakthrough involving the artist’s innovative use of fine glass rods known as ‘stringers’.

In this process, Belfrage applies heavily stretched, thinned and lengthened stringers to her blown glass forms early in production.

Rather than using commercially available stringers, Belfrage makes her own, painstakingly walking and stretching glass along tracks in order to produce very fine lengths of glass with the desired thickness, density, transparency and linear effects.

The Clare Belfrage exhibition, A Measure Of Time, will feature at the Bega Valley Regional Gallery from 16 November 2020 to 16 January 2021.

The Gallery, in Bega’s Zingel Place, is open from Monday to Friday from 10am to 4pm; entry is free.