Glass artist Mel Douglas documents the intersection between drawing, line and three-dimensionality. Working in Canberra across her home studio and at the Canberra Glassworks, her practice mediates glass as a sculptural medium and a site for her fine engraved mark-making and drawing. The incised surfaces tentatively allow for three-dimensionality to unfold from the flat glass. Mel’s most recent body of work continues to investigate glass as a medium that interacts with space, form and gesture. This successful rendering of tension and presence has been highly commended with Mel being a finalist in the 2026 Tom Malone Art prize and a finalist in the prestigious 2022 Loewe Foundation Art Prize.
Interstices explores the space between drawing and object, where the boundary between two-dimensional mark-making and three-dimensional form begins to dissolve. Working with glass, I use line not simply as surface detail, but as a structural element that defines and activates space. Through layering, overlap, and engraved mark-making, the works investigate how form and absence interact — how space can emerge as something both present and implied.
By treating the object itself as a kind of three-dimensional drawing, I seek to create forms that shift between solidity and transparency, certainty and suggestion. Interstices considers the intervals created through overlap and interaction: the subtle third spaces that emerge when lines, surfaces, and objects intersect. These interstitial spaces are not empty voids, but active sites of perception that exist between material presence and optical experience. As transparent forms converge, boundaries blur and new spatial relationships emerge, inviting viewers to engage with the quiet tension between what is seen, obscured, and suggested.
Mel Douglas, 2026
