Jessica Loughlin

South Australian artist Jessica Loughlin primarily creates work using kiln-formed glass-making techniques whereby glass is heated in a specialised oven to fuse glass together or to form the glass into different shapes using molds. This is known as ‘warm’ glass-making techniques and is distinct from ‘hot’ work, such as glass blowing where artists perform at speed to shape molten glass, or ‘cold’ techniques, like stained-glass or etching and engraving.

Since 1998 Loughlin has been dedicated to kiln-formed glass-making techniques which have facilitated her sculptural explorations of colour and light, and the ways in which we perceive such phenomena.

For most of her career, Loughlin has been fascinated by the horizon – the liminal edge between sky and earth. An observable yet elusive phenomenon, the horizon is a powerful metaphor for hope and the unknown, and is often an emblem for the future. For Loughlin, its poetic qualities are paralleled by the physical conditions of the horizon, particularly how we perceive distance through an increasing ‘blueness’ of the atmosphere. As Rebecca Solnit, American writer and inspiration to Loughlin, describes in A field guide to getting lost (2005):

I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, that colour of horizons, of remote mountain ranges, of anything far away. The colour of that distance is the colour of an emotion, the colour of solitude and of desire, the colour of there seen from here, the colour of where you are not. And the colour of where you can never go. For the blue is not in the place those miles away at the horizon, but in the atmospheric distance between you and the mountains.[1]

While atmospheric perspective is a concept more typically witnessed in painting, Loughlin has used fused glass to explore this sensation in her most recent work solari (2024). Installed above the eastern or Fish Gates entrance of the Art Gallery of South Australia, the large-scale disc is both lens and mirror to subtle shifts in changing daylight. As its title suggests–sol being the Latin word for sun and solaris meaning solace–the seemingly austere glass disc both situates and consoles us. It constitutes a slow-moving image of the unceasing cosmological events that shape and govern our lives.

Installed opposite solari is another glass work, a permanent stain-glass piece by Christian Waller (1894-1954), Prophet Isaiah, Apostle St Peter, Sundar Singh, 1936. This figurative work is in direct contrast to the formal abstraction of Loughlin, yet both pieces are about the qualities of light. Waller offers a nod to Australia’s longstanding interest in spiritualism and its influence on early twentieth-century artists, particularly those keen to explore inner realities, the nature of the invisible and an alternative vision of the world. Although Loughlin’s practice remains more attuned to Zen Buddhism, both Waller and Loughlin represent examples of art’s need to transcend the limitations of the ephemeral world to understand the unknown.[2]

solari is characteristic of Loughlin’s minimalist approach to object making, where three-dimensional forms are pared back to their essential geometry. While simple in form, the hand-worked precision of Loughlin’s sculptures allow for ever-changing complexity in colour as they capture a moving prism of light. They seek a similar transcendence or universality that can be found in the early minimalist works of the 1960s and 70s, including the nearby installation Untitled (1974-75) by American artist Donald Judd. Described as a ‘topographic object’, one length of Judd’s concrete triangle follows the slope of the gallery’s grounds while another sits level, creating an ‘horizontal ideal’.[3] Solari and Untitled share a horizon and the type of minimalism that, in many ways, contains the world.

[1] Rebecca Solnit, A field guide to getting lost, Canongate Books, Edinburgh, 2005, p. 29.

[2] Da Silva, José. Inner Sanctum | 18th Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, 2024, pg. 38

[3] James Lawrence quoted by Maria Zagala, ‘Curator’s Insight – Donald Judd Untitled’, AGSA website.