Jessica Loughlin is a highly committed and passionate artist who is highly regarded both in Australia and internationally. Her thoughtful and instinctual approach, together with extaordinary technical skills with the medium sees her work collected by both public institutions and private collectors around the world. With a gentle colour palette of soft muted hues, her work often explores ideas of evaporation, space and distance, all inherently in the Australian landscape.
Jessica Loughlin’s work is characterised by a strict reductive sensibility and restricted use of colour. Fusing kiln formed sheets of opaque and translucent glass together in flat panels or in thin, geometric compositions and vessels, she alludes to shadow, reflection and refraction. Loughlin’s work is influenced by the flat landscapes and salt lakes of South Australia, and the recurring motif of the mirage appears in much of her work. Each piece their own poetic statement.
Originally from Melbourne, Australia, Jessica Loughlin is a graduate of the Canberra School of Art under the tutelage of late Stephen Procter. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Corning Museum of Glass, the National Gallery of Australia, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, National Museums Scotland, Edinburgh GB, and the Musee de Design et d’Arts Appliques Contemporains in Lausanne, Switzerland.
Loughlin has been a studio artist for over twenty years, exhibiting both nationally and internationally. This yearshe was the first Australian to have work selected as afinalist in the Loewe Craft Prize. In 2018 she was awarded the Fuse Glass Prize, and in 2004 and 2007, the Tom Malone Art Prize. Her work is part of major public collections around the world including National Gallery of Australia, Queensland Art Gallery, Australia, Corning Museum of Glass NY, USA, Mobile Museum of Art AL, USA, MUDAC Lausanne, Switzerland and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK.
For many years I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that colour of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, anything far away. The colour of that distance is the colour of an emotion, the colour of solitude and desire, the colour of there seen from here, the colour of where you are not.
The world is blue at its edges and in its depth. Blue is the light that got lost. Light at the end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses amongst the molecules of the air, it scatters in water.”
1. Solnit, R, 2005, A field guide to getting lost, Viking Penguin, NY, USA, pg29
My pieces are about the observation of light. They almost perform as a ‘tabular rasa’ for noticing subtle changes of light throughout the day. The opaline glass behaves in a similar way to light in the sky. Fine molecules in the glass reflect blue light while transmitting the warm spectrum of light. At first glance these pieces may appear white, but on closer inspection the colours appear and slowly change as the light shifts throughout the day.
Jessica Loughlin
