Vicki Halper

Links documents the first presentation of a broad spectrum of contemporary Australian studio glass to an American audience. The book explores an international network of craft influences and exchanges that started in the mid-1970s, clarifies techniques of glass production from manufacture to finished product, and illustrates significant contemporary glasswork that is not blown.Links begins in 1974, when American Richard Marquis traveled to Australia at the request of its government to promote studio glass and establish hot shops in educational institutions. His relationship with Australian Nick Mount initiated a lineage of blown-glass artists that is represented in the book. A second lineage of artists working in kiln-formed glass was initiated in 1979 when Klaus Moje, soon to be head of the Canberra School of Art Glass Workshop at ANU, met the founder of Oregon's Bullseye Glass Company at the Pilchuck Glass School north of Seattle. At Moje's instigation, the Bullseye factory began to research and manufacture fusible, compatible glass-a complicated technical feat. Their product has fueled an explosion of kiln-worked glass internationally, most prominently in Australia.The book features the work of 25 Australian artists linked to each other and to the Northwest through workshops and classes, use of a common material, training and education, shared space, and/or production assistance.Exhibition curator Vicki Halper , Seattle, specializes in art of the Pacific Northwest and American craft. She is the co-editor of Choosing Craft: The Artist's Viewpoint and Morris Graves: Selected Letters. Margot Osborne and Grace Cochrane are esteemed Australian art historians and curators. Lani McGregor is co-owner of Bullseye Glass and director of Bullseye Gallery.

A first-century Roman cinerary urn. A Coca-Cola bottle from 1910. A contemporary sculpture of bandaged bones.Contrasts: A Glass Primer presents a wide variety of remarkable glass objects in an accessible and lively format. These objects are grouped, as in a child's book of opposites, to illustrate highlights in glass history (factory/studio, for example), characteristics of the medium (fluid/rigid), and ways of describing art in general (abstract/figurative). Above all, Contrasts is an invitation to creative seeing.Contrasts: A Glass Primer is published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name on display at the Museum of Glass, Tacoma, through November 2009.