The Glass Invitational New Zealand is the premier glass exhibition in New Zealand. It is a survey show of contemporary art glass and features nearly 60 carefully chosen works from seventeen selected artists for whom glass is the primary medium of expression. This exhibition is also shown at Pataka - Porirua Museum of Arts & Culture, and Rotorua Museum of Art & History.

Emma Camden’s towers are architectural structures with internalised ribbing that explore abstract issues of the grid and patterning as well as presenting the humanistic concerns of the temple.

Stephen Bradbourne’s tall cylinders use a tablet pattern that becomes distorted and disrupted by vertical elements.

Wendy Fairclough melds the suburban cliché of everyday functional objects into a poem about social and environmental change. Elements of the remembered native bush are engraved as a panorama that moves seamlessly from one object onto the next.

Shona Firman’s limpet forms are a scaled exaggeration of the gastropods that cling to rocks. Deeply carved underneath yet open and vulnerable on top these limpets are a metaphor of the marine environment.

Sam Ireland’s works are provocative, exploring modernist concerns of form and deconstructed function with a sense of humour and the influence of popular culture.

Merryn Jones captures the chaos of a grapevine and the specifics of autumn in a lyrical form that also examines the effects and consequences of multiple shadow and colour interplay.

Trudi Kroef uses porcelain with glass and the cross materiality of these objects present issues of containment and housing in forms of simple elegance and fluidity.

Nicole Lucas employs the worlds of nursery rhyme and dance in a series of rhubarb coloured pairs of shoes that change to green under fluorescent light.

Elizabeth McClure has taken the subject of found shape and classical object – Chard Farm wine bottles – and transmuted them by carving the surface into a vocabulary of mark making, movement and overlay.

David Murray examines sculptural concerns of scale and contradiction with elements of menace, suggestion of fragility and a signature graduation of colour and density.

Garry Nash has combined cast and blown glass together with a group of vase forms that source his own language as an artist and remind that colour is the cornerstone of the studio glass movement just as much as they are specific to New Zealand native flowers and plants.

Lyndsay Patterson combines blowing with varied engraving techniques such as carving and surface incising. To this he has added the narrative element of text as further development of horizontal banding.

Lou Pendergrast’s coloured vessels combine the understated presence of frilled textiles with the repetition of form inside form. Ann Robinson sources the flora and light of New Zealand in iconic vase forms. Her trademark concerns are significantly developed into a potent new subject of a bromeliad flower in two parts. The tension established by the gorge between becomes a metaphor of the New Zealand landscape.

Liz Sharek’s two groups of works are different in effect but share many concerns of layering, transparency and translucency. The forms are organic in nature and have the quality of drawing in space and air while establishing incomparable internal worlds of surface inside surface, colour inside clear.

Emily Siddell uses the language of adornment as a subject in a related group of works that combine the humorous contradictions of woven wire handbags with clear glass falling through.

Layla Walter combines the hand built quality of a bowl with surface patterning of woven cloth that places her work in the Pacific dynamic in works as remarkable for their beauty as for the precision of simplicity.