Mel Douglas

Mel Douglas (Australian, born 1978), Callow II, 2015, blown, cold-worked, and engraved glass. Gift of David Kaplan and Glenn Ostergaard, 2019.102.

Since earning a BA degree from The Australian National University School of Art in Canberra in 2000, Mel Douglas has received major awards and established herself as a distinguished independent studio artist.

Douglas considers the materiality of glass in relation to the characteristics of drawing. Her art explores and interweaves her object with drawings in which her form becomes a three-dimensional drawing itself. Using the unique qualities of glass, and the potential of mark making on glass, she uses line as a way to inform, define, and enable three-dimensional space.

In this work, the artist appears to suspend lines in space on its surfaces through transparency, translucency, and opacity of glass. The artist states: “Each line is a unique mark influenced by the object’s physical shape and surface; it is a contour, a stroke, an outline. The repetitions and time-consuming method of mark making is not only a meditative process; in its very creation it describes a singular moment and a certain place.” (Australian Galleries brochure, 2010)