Glass 09 is now well-established as an important annual survey exhibition. It includes prominent, critically acclaimed, internationally collected New Zealand glass artists as well as emerging artists who have produced work of importance in the preceding twelve months.

Lee Brogan (who won the Molly Morpeth Canaday Award for glass in 2008) and Sue Hawker are both from the emerging glass community in Northland. They are using and reinvigorating the pate de verre technique of cast glass which permits qualities of apparent fragility, pitted surface and holes in the form to develop as integral devices. Consequently Brogan’s large scale skull forms have powerful narratives about mortality. Conversely Hawker’s works explore through a built lattice structure the deconstruction of the vase form with startling results.

Kate Rutecki (who has recently migrated to New Zealand from the United States of America where she is represented by prominent galleries) presents a suite of flying birds mounted on stands. Her ability to reveal the anatomy of birds and the motion of flight is very convincing. To this human-like tenderness is added. Mike Crawford is also presenting bird forms but he has abstracted these to single colour forms and fluid rhythms.

Simon Wards has taken the ubiquitous New Zealand wooden lamppost and turned this into a glass metaphor. He makes the everyday unique and precious.

Lyndsay Patterson – like Stephen Bradbourne – works in hot glass, blowing forms which are then cold-worked (by being carved back). Recipient of the Thomas Foundation Glass Award (2006), Patterson has produced a grouping of inter-related carved landscape vessels that explore notions of being. Bradbourne’s murrine bottle forms are elegant and exquisite, demonstrating a mastery of restricted colour and pattern.

Claudia Borella is an internationally prominent glass artist based in Wanganui. The abstract language of her work is noticeably painterly in character. The unique effects achieved through the technique of fusing glass layers together and how light interact with the surface and depths make her work very special.

Evelyn Dunstan (winner of the Ranamok Glass Prize, 2007) works at the outer edge of what is possible in cast glass. Her open basket forms of entwined branches, leaves and flowers are technical astonishments as well as being decisive and forthright in their environmental narratives.

The highly regarded Emily Siddell, Robyn Irwin and Luke Jacomb complete the line-up of Glass 09 with key works.