Co-curated by JamFactory's CEO Brian Parkes and Margaret Hancock Davis, GLASS: art design architecture, explores every angle of the material and the ways it can be worked in to anything from tiny, fragile jewellery, to massive, iconic buildings.

 

"On the one hand it's such an ubiquitous, everyday material. I'm staring through it right now," Parkes says.

 

"We deal with it in so many ways. I just had a sip of water out of a glass. I'm looking at a glass screen, staring through a glass window. It's around us all the time and we often take it for granted."

 

GLASS, then, seeks out the mystery and wonder in the material. The exhibition has gathered everything from contemporary tea sets to windows from the SAHMRI building.

 

"A cut glass crystal is a fascinating object for any child or person. It just defies logic, the way that light works through it.

 

"It's such an extraordinary material, because you can see through it, because of the way that light refracts and reflects from it.  We were deliberately keen to have people consider the breadth of use of the material by creative people."

 

There's a tendency, Parkes says, to approach glass simply from a visual arts point of view, as beautiful sculptural objects - something South Australia's JamFactory has a long history with. But there's more to it than that.

 

"We really wanted this to be a way of using the material as a starting point, but looking out in to the world of creative endeavour, across those areas of art, design and architecture - and also the gaps between them."

 

One of the major displays is that of Woods Bagot's SAHMRI building. Located on the northwestern corner of Adelaide, it's a gravity-defying glass wonder. GLASS art design architecture has acquired a full-scale prototype of one of the medical research building's hooded, triangular windows.