Clare Belfrage has maintained a distinguished arts practice for over 35 years. Her detailed and complex glass drawings on blown glassforms reflect the high-level skill and innovative approach to her craft that makes her one of the country’s most renowned artists in this medium. Inspired by nature and its various rhythms and energies, Clare‘s exquisite sculptural objects express her fine attention to detail, a fascination with pattern and rhythm and deep connection to the natural world.
Clare has received several prestigious awards including the inaugural JamFactory FUSE Glass Prize in 2016 and the Tom Malone Glass Prize Art Gallery of Western Australia in 2005 and 2011. She was the featured artist for the 2018 SALA Festival and celebrated as one of South Australia’s most influential artists working in a craft medium through JamFactory’s Icon series, presenting a solo exhibition, A Measure of Time, for a 3 year national tour.
Clare continues to exhibit extensively and is represented in major public collections throughout Australia, the US and Europe including National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, most Australian State collections, Corning Museum of Glass, USA, Tacoma Museum of Glass, USA, Ebeltoft Glass Museum, Denmark, Castello Sforzesco Museum, Italy and the Nijima Glass Museum, Japan.
She is currently Adjunct Professor with UniSA Creative at the University of South Australia.
‘The rhythms of the natural world continue to draw me in, shifting and expanding my experience of time. It’s like the bush or forest is\ textured with different kinds of time. I feel this through the majesty and movement of tree-life, the softness and subtlety of surface growths like lichen and moss, the colours and textures of an understorey. Inspired and energised by these experiences my view is from close up, focussing on the detail both real and imagined.’ Clare Belfrage
