Lavish Gnashing

Lavish Gnashing expands upon the ancient traditions of elaborate, and sometimes comical, representational glass vessel production. Informed by his scholarship and consistent with his bestiary of playful vitreous figures, the central figure walks a fine line between eccentricity and technical rigour. In Moore’s words ‘it delights in the serious dedication that is necessary for making intricately patterned glass, together with an irreconcilable, off-kilter absurdity’.

The morphologies of Moore’s creations know few limitations due to their maker’s skill in hot working glass and his overactive imagination. As both a vessel-maker and sculptor, Moore is most interested in objects that bridge these two realms. He also references the history of European art and collections, drawing specifically on the rich history of the Wunderkammer as a site of metamorphic transformation. In Lavish Gnashing Moore simultaneously subverts Venetian glass traditions and references the Renaissance penchant for miraculous objects crafted from precious metals, minerals and the wonders of nature. Sporting red coral, ostrich eggs and gold, these prized objects found their inheritance in South Australia in the nineteenth century through the production of playful epergne by esteemed makers including Johann Heinrich Steiner and Julius Schomburgk who worked with emu eggs, silver and malachite, the antipodean equivalents of northern wonders. The title of the work, Lavish Gnashing, can be loosely understood to reference an idea of luxurious anxiety, signalling the artist’s ecological concerns and his cognisance of our human extravagance in the face of climate chaos.

Tom Moore was born in 1971 in Canberra, Australia. He started working with glass in his late teens and graduated from Canberra School of Art, Australian National University, in 1994. Moore trained in production techniques at JamFactory until 1997 and worked as Production Manager in the JamFactory's glass studio for fifteen years. In 2019, Moore was awarded a PhD from the University of South Australia for his thesis 'Agents of Incongruity: Glassmaking embraces nonsense to navigate monsters, wonder and dread'.