Born in 1966 Giles Bettison, a glass maker started making his distinctive glass vessels with their innovative murrini decoration, in late 1995, and now has a national and international reputation for this work. He became interested in glass making in Adelaide, influenced by artists in the glass workshop at Jam Factory Craft and Design, and by the visiting American glass artists Richard Marquis and Dante Marioni in 1992, before enrolling at the Canberra School of Art where he started working with this process.
Skilled as a fitter and turner, and also a musician, Bettison started to work with glass artists in Adelaide in 1992. He helped with the construction of some individual studios and furnaces and started to work as a production glass blower at JamFactory Craft and Design. Interested in traditional practices and aware of his enjoyment of skill based activity, he saw in glass-working an opportunity to bring his various interests together: 'I thought,’ he said, 'that people working with passion from a tradition tended to be the people who had the clearest dialogue with their materials and processes, and did it best. I enjoy the idea that I am playing music that is thousands of years old. With glass, I get huge pleasure out of being part of all that tradition, and to be able to contribute to it.’
The visit to Australia of American glass artists Dick Marquis and Dante Marioni in 1994 confirmed his commitment to making glass: at their demonstrations in Adelaide and Canberra he found himself 'in awe of their dedication, their vision and their assuredness’. He 'watched like a hawk’ and became interested in the murrini technique. In 1994 he enrolled in the Canberra School of Art, graduating with First Class Honours in 1996. He started to experiment with making murrini vessels with segments of canes cut from fused sheets of Bullseye glass, prompted by the opportunity of working as technical assistant for the 'Latitudes 1’ workshops in 1995, where he worked as technical assistant. Here, made possible by the compatible glass developed by Bullseye, glassblowers worked alongside kilnworkers to combine their processes. At this time he was researching the work of early modernist artists like Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers, and he became interested in Anni Albers’s drawings and textile designs. He saw connections between his interests and the traditions of textiles and tried to capture the vitality and energy of, for example, the patterns, textures and cultural value of textiles from Africa and Asia.
The technique Giles Bettison uses is a new variation on an old method used for making murrini from compound canes of coloured glass, and including them in blown or moulded forms. Instead of the traditional bundles of cylindrical canes, that are then heated, stretched and cut into segments, the process involves the use of Bullseye coloured sheet glass. This company, the Bullseye Glass Company in Portland, Oregon, USA, manufactures coloured sheet glass, and for many years has worked with artists like Klaus Moje in Canberra, to develop compatible glasses for fusing and kilnforming, and later blowing glass. Different coloured sheets of glass are cut into rectangles and are then stacked up according to design, placed in a kiln and fused together. Strips are then cut, heated and stretched into canes (to about 20 × 1500mm) with multiple coloured stripes, reducing the size of the coloured elements. The cane undergoes an annealing process before being cut into murrini pieces about 6mm thick and then stacked, fused and stretched again. These are cut into murrini tiles, that are then laid out, side by side in rows, on a steel plate dressed with clay. The plate is then heated in the kiln until the murrini are fused together to form a homogenous sheet. A collar of clear hot glass the end of a blow-pipe is rolled along the edge of the sheet to pick it up off the plate. The sides are then rolled and joined together and the end closed off. From then on, the process to shape the form is basically the same as normal glass blowing. The surface is ground when cold. (See notes in file and photos in Bullseye catalogue).
Giles Bettison’s work has been exhibited in Australia at galleries including Quadrivium, Sydney, and in exhibitions such as Return of Beauty (JamFactory, Adelaide) 2000, Contemporary Australian Craft (Powerhouse Museum and Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art 1999), Young Glass International in Ebeltoft, Denmark 1997, and he had a solo show at the Barry Friedman Gallery in New York, N.Y. in 2001. His work has been profiled in journals such as Glass (Autumn 1997) and New Glass Review 17/96, 35/98. He has also won several awards including a development grant from the Australia Council to participate in the Bullseye Glass Residency Program in Portland, Oregon (1998), and the 1999 Urban Glass New Talent Award, given by the international Urban Glass Center in New York. He also has been awarded the Mitchell Giurgola Thorpe Architects Award for Design and the Australia National University Acquisition Award; has been a finalist in the Ebeltoft Young Glass International Glassmuseum (Denmark), the City of Hobart Art Prize, and the Resource Finance Corporation Glass Prize; and received a PONCHO scholarship to attend the Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle, Washington.
Notes compiled from interviews with, and notes supplied to Grace Cochrane 1997-2001, and published variously in Glass (Autumn 1997); Young International Artists in Glass: Australia, Bullseye Glass Co 1998; and Return of Beauty, JamFactory Craft and Design 2000.
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