Join the Canberra Art Biennial at the Glassworks for an evening of art, conversation, and live glassblowing, complete with a glass of bubbles.

Artists Erin Dickson and Emma Rani Hodges will be in conversation with Canberra Glassworks Artistic Director, Aimee Frodsham, to discuss their works currently on display at the Glassworks during the festival. Joining them will be glassmaker and designer Katie-Ann Houghton, who will give a live demonstration of her Palate Cleanser Tumbler in the Hotshop.

Thursday 24 October at 5pm for a 5.30pm start in the Glassworks Hotshop.
Light refreshments including bubbles provided. Please RSVP for catering purposes.

This event is in partnership with Canberra Art Biennial 2024

About the artists

Emma Rani Hodges

Presenting a new body of work @canberraglassworks titled ‘I’m more, I’m not forgotten parts’, Emma will create an installation in the foyer of Glassworks that explores memory, mythology and ghosts.
In this new presentation Emma cannibalizes their old artworks to create something new. This is a process of remembering, ripping, cutting and eventually repairing alongside making new parts. Emma works with the philosophy that memory can be stored in objects, recalling their cultural connection to animism. The pieces of fabric that make up this installation all lived lives before arriving here. Some of the fabric belonged to Emma’s grandmother, who was a seamstress in Nonthaburi. These scraps of fabric came from a place where ancestor worship and care for ghosts is embedded in everyday practice. Within this installation there are spirit houses and characters from Thai folklore. For Emma, this installation is a place for souls to rest and for their childhood memories and fear of ghosts to take a physical form.

Erin Dickson

Exploring ideas of home through language, culture and vernacular architecture, Erin Dickson’s expansive practice engages tongue-in-cheek themes of ‘Britishness’. Working in the space between craft and digital manufacture, she works both physically and virtually, from processing data to create 3D models to developing systems of correspondence. Through humour, Dickson’s sculpture, video and installations soften deliberately provocative subject matter including British class systems, AI bias, intimacy, community, and isolation.

Her work has been exhibited internationally, most notably at Glasstress, a collateral event of the Venice Biennale, as well as the Royal Academy of Arts, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and FACT Liverpool, UK. She has received international grants and awards including an Honorary Diploma from the Jutta Cuny Foundation, Germany, The Kyohei Fujita Memorial Prize from Glasmuseet Ebeltoft, Denmark, and a National Lottery Project Grant from Arts Council England. Dickson lives and works in Bungendore, NSW.

Katie-Ann Houghton

Katie-Ann Houghton is a mid-career glass artist and designer based in Canberra who specialises in glass blowing. Katie-Ann’s work challenges the culture of mass consumption by creating pieces with innovative design and handmade quality. Her design philosophy is based around the idea that the objects that we engage with every day should engage our senses and bring us joy through use. Designed to be both functional and practical, her production range, which includes CGW Signature’s Conversion series and Sapphire Vase, aims to change the conventional expectations of tableware and have us view each piece as both a piece of contemporary design and an object of use.