Exhibitions

Sabbia Gallery is excited to present Brenden’s upcoming solo exhibition. One of the most exciting glass artists in Australia, he says of this new body of work.

Brenden Scott French is a South Australian artist who works in both blown and kilnformed glass. He has trained extensively in glass practice in Sydney, Adelaide and Canberra since 1997. During the past twenty years he has exhibited widely both in Australia and overseas.

He is the 2020 recipient of the ArtGroup Creative Fellowship from Canberra Glassworks. Brenden has also undertaken residencies at the Tacoma Museum of Glass in Tacoma USA, Northlands Creative Glass Centre, Lybster, Scotland and the Australian National University Glass Workshop. In 2007 he was the recipient of the Stephen Procter Fellowship.

I have approached landscape as an historical concept realised as a metaphor of power, looping through constructs of original habitation, identity and identification and geologic environmental perceptions. Navigating this construct through the politic and experience of inclusion and exclusion, these new works endeavour to provide a coherent point of reference to the relationship between power and trust.

At this particular intersection I have relied upon two underlining thoughts to frame my practice – myth and heresy – as a way of subverting and of problematising my own relationship to landscape and power. These two concepts invigorate a basic perspective baring witness to the contemporary socio-political environment with a strong hint towards the dismantling of corrupted and corrosive hierarchies. Perpetual motifs of the home in a particularly familiar landscape of trees are important identifiers for this body of work. Paradoxically, a gentle breeze pushes pale blue turquoise into pale rose pink, though a flutter and a blink pass and the temporal looping is present again, the tall trees guide and the home opens and warms.

Having recently completed the Creative Fellowship at Canberra Glassworks, a six month residency experimenting and developing new processes, one insight among many is currently screaming loudest, trust my practice. So here are new works that arrive from this confidence, and speak of the connectedness between life and work in an ordinary, looping kind of day.

Brenden Scott French, 2021