Having established her studio in 1987, Kirstie has over the past three decades continued to develop her practice to become one of Australia’s most influential, successful and respected artists working in glass.
Kirstie Rea has also taught internationally, at the Australian National University Glass Workshop, in the United States at Pilchuck Glass School, the Corning Studio, and Pittsburgh Glass Centre, North Lands Creative Glass in Scotland, and Vetroricerca School in Italy. In 2009, Kirstie was awarded Honorary Life Membership of Ausglass, the national organisation of Australian glass artists’.
She has exhibited widely internationally and her work has been included in numerous Australian glass survey shows. Kirstie has had solo exhibitions in Australia, the USA, New Zealand and Hong Kong, and her work is now included in international collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the National Gallery of Australia and the Alexander Tutsek-Stiftung Foundation in Munich, Germany.
Over Kirstie’s career, whilst the forms may have radically changed, the work has always been inspired by her love of outdoor spaces, in particular looking at the details within those landscapes. Memories, especially from her childhood, inform the work and she continues to be intrigued about the space between herself and these outside spaces.
I walk to stop, to be still.
A fluid stillness that plants my feet. They consider growing roots, a momentary transplant.
Between clouds, trees, boulders and a creek in a valley, the fragility of moments becomes transparent and tangible.
My body of work explores the sculptural possibilities of a sheet of glass, along with heat and gravity. Each work an abstraction of place, time, light and lines. Pared back but infused with colour drawn from the decorative elements that clothe and place a landscape, it is an abstraction of hills and valleys walked.
Seemingly soft, fluid glass forms nest within, are held by or connected to a customised wall structure, abstracted from the ageless more static elements and spaces of place – rock, boulder, space between trees.
At the core of my practice lies the desire to seek an understanding of our often tenuous connections to place. Walking in places beyond urban environments, seeking solitude and distance, photography and writing have become tools to inform my making.
Kirstie Rea
