All That Glitters
Porcelain Menagerie: Duck, 2022, oil on panel, 14 x 14 x 1.8cm. Private collection
Porcelain Menagerie: Bear, 2022, oil on panel, 14 x 14 x 1.8cm
Porcelain Menagerie: Cat, 2022, oil on panel, 14 x 14 x 1.8cm. Private collection
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Porcelain Menagerie: Elephant, 2022, oil on panel, 14 x 14 x 1.8cm
Porcelain Menagerie: Rooster, 2022, oil on panel, 14 x 14 x 1.8cm
Porcelain Menagerie: Dachshund, 2022, oil on panel, 14 x 14 x 1.8cm
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Porcelain Menagerie: Golden Retriever, 2022, oil on panel, 14 x 14 x 1.8cm
Porcelain Menagerie: Deer, 2022, oil on panel, 14 x 14 x 1.8cm. Private collection
Porcelain Menagerie: Manatee, 2022, oil on panel, 14 x 14 x 1.8cm
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All That Glitters, 2022-23, Tuggeranong Arts Centre
The coterie of glitter-wielding artists who make up All That Glitters declare that sparkle has substance.
Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune is set on a fictional planet named Arrakis, which is mined for a precious substance named, simply and ambiguously, “spice”. In the 2022 film of the same name, the qualities of spice - and its value - are foreshadowed by its appearance, a golden-hued iridescent powder. This glimmering dust is capable of miraculous feats, facilitating space navigation by psychedelically addling and enhancing the mind. Furthermore, we know it’s special, because it shines. Spice reminds us that what glimmers, what glitters, set apart by its surface qualities, is wrested from the ordinary and distinguished as precious. This is true too in All That Glitters, a joyful visual paean to the glittery and the precious. While the artists in All That Glitters deal with the altogether more intimate and personal miracles of glittering substances - such as that of delivering joy and play to those of us who have endured a long, dark pandemic - it’s clear that to these artists, the value of glitter has a multitude of facets, and the material itself is capable of richness and depth.
For precious materials like metals or gemstones, their glitter is a signifier of their value. Slivered down to minute flakes, however, glitter itself is frequently perceived as devoid of value, wedded to kitsch in ways that prevent its embrace as an art material of significant worth. The artists in All That Glitters explore the qualities and the value of glitter, of glitz, of sparkle, in manifold manifestations; whether it be through narrative, nostalgia, cultural ties, or its ability to accompany the artists as they push into new ways of being and doing, to provide levity and solace in bleak times, to cast light when all seems dim.
Michele Grimston has pursued a more personal iteration of her painstaking, meticulous textile practice. In All That Glitters, she uses her characteristic recycled materials to yield small vessels made from her favourite garments, too well-loved to be worn, threads of her hair, and skeins of glittering lamé yarn. Preciousness, to Michele, is about treating resources with reverence by reusing and recycling, by folding them back into our lives again and again, until they are woven into everyday objects, into our precious well-used heirlooms. Gold lamé thread, in Grimston’s case, is used to attract: she exploits the invitational quality of gold to draw would-be magpie-viewers in to more closely inspect her rewardingly detailed vessels and glean the full experience of her tiny, beautiful offerings.
Romany Fairall proclaims her love for sparkle in the form of obsessively rendered panels, composed of woven glittery threads, and embellished, glitter-laden mobiles. Fairall desires to claw back reverence for glitter and shine from the naysayers who malign it as a “feminine hobby” or “low art”. With her painstaking work, Fairall makes glitter a serious and compelling material. Her sustained yet delicate use of glitter is a refusal of its reputation as a superficial or infantile surface, and in the same breath, a reclamation of kitsch, play, and glitz as serious artistic inquiry. Glitter is no featherweight substance, but like any other, a material where its value depends on its relationship with the artist’s hand, and the outcome is alchemical, forged in a crucible of trial, error and time.
Painting the likenesses of the porcelain baby animals she collects, with all their manufactured shine, Tiffany Cole explores what happens when reflection and shine is translated into painting. Her visual fascination with reflectiveness corresponds with a nostalgic love of kitschy baubles. By painting these porcelain creatures in their states of high gleam, she transfers a sense of preciousness to objects that are, culturally and monetarily speaking, low status. In Cole’s work, as in Grimston and Fairall’s, preciousness is conferred by her singular, almost obsessive attention to her subject and to the deployment of the materials she wields.
Helen Braund draws from a deep love of filmmaking. In All That Glitters she explores sculpture, rendering small ‘sets’ that might ordinarily be the basis for her surreal photographs. The materials, to Braund, add a “sticky luminous gleam” to the “half-remembered dream” of her diorama scenes. Helen’s works are intended to engine joy. For her, the process of making these works was “like a life raft”, offering “permission to focus on something that felt pure and bright and to use art as a mechanism for play and a way into a more magical sparkly place”. And in turn, she transfers this joyful experience to the viewer to absorb and generate themselves. The light-casting qualities of the glitter used by Braund are more than merely material.
An unabashed joy in kitsch and glitz is also resoundingly endorsed by Emma Rani Hodges. Emma explores “what it is to live between two cultures” and how to express that hybridity in a new visual language. For them, “kitsch, glitter, gold and glitz” are hallmarks of Thai cultural identity, which they then marry in their work with aesthetic signifiers of Australian identity. A love of glitter has passed down to Hodges from their mother, and they associate glitter with high femininity; while also contending that femininity in Australia is a comparatively beige visual experience. Emma explores the tension between these two outwardly divergent cultural experiences of femininity through the lens of their experience as a non-binary artist. Their textile collages are a way of articulating that a kitschy aesthetic is “sincere, beautiful and not for the ‘uneducated’.” This mirrors the exhibition’s loftiest goal - to enable the audience to imagine what if. What if glitter, and all it stands for, was truly valued in the vein of its more “precious” shiny siblings? It’s not an impossibility. After all, as Hodges says, “there are so many treasured and loved kitsch, glittery, shiny objects in the world.”
All That Glitters is an exhibition that hinges on a seeming contradiction. Here the frivolousness of glitter is being wholeheartedly embraced and refused, simultaneously. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say the frivolous beauty of glitter is held aloft, regarded with a reverent and serious eye, and given weight as a material of value. Its value may be nostalgic, whether in the baby animal figurines of Tiffany Cole’s paintings, Emma Rani Hodge’s personal experiences of Thai feminine identity, or Helen Braund’s memories of slathering on glitter as make-up in the 90s (we all did it!). Or else its value may be in its capabilities, as in Dune; in this case for its near-miraculous ability to produce a joyful response in those who engage with it. The refusal, then, is to refuse to accede to the long-held idea that “all that glitters” must be cheap, gaudy, “feminine” and therefore knocked down a peg to the status of mere amateur craft. To that the artists of this exhibition urge you, to quote Romany Fairall, to “empower the use of glittery shit!”
Vive glitter!
Natalie Mather, October 2022