Louis Grant is a queer early career artist whose work seamlessly crosses between studio glass and inter-disciplinary practice. He recognises the importance of traditional craft skills and uses them to push the boundaries of both glass making and contemporary sculpture. Graduating in 2018 with a Bachelor of Visual Art (Honours) from the Australian National University School of Art and Design, Grant works professionally within the Canberra arts community and as an independent studio artist. Grant has exhibited in solo and group shows nationally, internationally, and participated in prize shows including; Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize, Talente (GER), National Emerging Glass Art Prize, Hatched National Graduate Exhibition. Grant has been an invited teachers assistant for masterclasses at Pilchuck Glass School, Corning Museum of Glass (USA) and Canberra Glassworks.
Grants work and practice has been featured in various publications, his work has found it’s way into the interiors of a Flack Studio designed project and he continues to be the lead fabricator of the Australian Of The Year Awards for the ANU.
My practice focuses on glass as a main material to speak of a queer identity, notions of fluidity, instability, care and fragility. Firmly embedded in the technical understanding of glass (from undergrad studies in glass through to ongoing work at Canberra Glassworks and as a technical assistant to senior artists), I work to shift the positions within the discipline and the (traditionally largely masculinised) spaces of production, queering the medium and deviating from what is understood as ‘proper’ form and finish. My practice responds to the discipline of glass – taking the ‘mastery’ of traditional craft beyond a skill set into a subject position to speak of gender and power issues. Glass is a fluid medium that is constantly in a state of becoming, I use this material to speak of social and psychological spaces that can themselves be seen as ‘unstable compounds’. Moving outside of the conventions of studio glass, I produce works that are increasingly testing the relationships between glass and other materials. Often generated from personal narratives, I fashion oversensitive, hyper-fragile entities that are not so much fragile because made of glass, but because of the emotional tumult they’re arranged in and by.
Louis Grant, 2026
