Artists Profile

Matthew Matthew Farrell creates works in glass that are the result of an intense exploration of the contemporary possibilities and expressive potential of this fascinating and ancient medium. One of Australia’s premiere young glass artists, Matthew is able to bring a fresh and unique perspective to his work through experience gained in both flame-worked and furnace-worked glass. A professional lampworker since 2000, Matthew has benefited from close creative associations with two of Australia’s most celebrated glass artists, Colin Heaney and Noel Hart and is a regular contributing artist at Kirra Galleries’ ‘Glass on Flame’ exhibition, the annual showcase of Australia’s finest lampworking artists. In 2007 Matthew further expanded his creative possibilities through the purchase of Heaney’s glass blowing studio located at Byron Bay on the beautiful North Coast of NSW, where visitors are always warmly invited to browse the gallery and view the glass-working process. Here Matthew works with a small team of highly skilled glass craftsmen to create his stunning and distinctive pieces.

It was while working with Hart (who had formally been a painter) during the early development of his ‘parrot series’ that Matthew began to explore the expressive potential of glass beyond its inherent decorative quality.

An accomplished musician specialising in instruments from India, Matthew says that, like music, glass art combines the seemingly contrary elements of improvisation with an exacting mind-body synthesis. The liquidity of hot glass and its manipulation with a hand tool in a circular fashion means it is sensitive to the slightest variation in centrifugal forces. By necessity you cannot approach working with glass with anything other than a single-minded concentration.

Focus, concentration, creativity: all must come together at once, even in the working of the most simplest forms. ‘It makes little difference whether I make a small decorative piece or a large-scale sculptural form, the mindset is always the same,’ Matthew says. ‘It is this need for the constant return to focus that has always sustained my passion for glassblowing.’

But it is also the ability of glass to outwit time that fuels Matthew’s ongoing fascination with the medium. Glass, he says, is frozen only to human space-time parameters, it ‘remains liquid, always flowing on a molecular level, though it moves only fractions of millimetres across the expanse of a millenia’. It is this concept that has fascinated Matthew and, for him, places glass alongside music as ‘the physical manifestation of a deeper spiritual quality flowing through our lives.’