Emma Varga was born in Yugoslavia in 1952, where she graduated from University of Applied Arts in Belgrade. Trained as both glass sculptor and glass designer, she pursued both during the first half of her career. She moved to Australia in 1995 where she continued creating glass art and building her international profile by participating in over 100 benchmark international exhibitions and staging over 30 solo exhibitions in Australia and abroad.
Her current work focuses on environmental concerns – raising awareness by visually communicating both the beauty and fragility of our natural environment. Emma developed two innovative glass art creating methods: Multiple layers fusing, which enables creating controlled 3-dimensional images within the slab of glass. The other is her own distinctive method within Pâte de Verre techniques, which lends itself as the best way to implement the notion of fragility.
Her works are included in numerous museum’s collections in Australia, USA and Europe. With a career spanning over 50 years, Emma was honoured with a retrospective exhibition at Wagga Wagga Art Glass Gallery, home of the National Glass Collection, in December 2023 to March 2024.
The walk among my small studio garden was once a joyful daily ritual, looking forward to being surrounded by the beauty of the native coastal flora.
However, the growing concerns for global warming and its effects on the natural world taint these experiences with a rising anxiety for the future of our environment. I do not aim to distil the natural devastation that is currently occurring, but rather reinforce the notion of the fragility and vulnerability of our environment.
With each fragile glass granular, the technique of Pâte de verre beautifully describes the fragility of our environment in its current state of turmoil, immortalising the beauty inherent in my surrounding ecosystem.
The fear of losing such immense natural ecosystem should prompt us into action to preserve and truly appreciate our natural world and our place within it.
Emma Varga, 2025
