The Prize has played a major role in achieving significant links and paths within this field of visual arts and it remains the major focus for Australian and New Zealand contemporary glass.
Its success has far exceeded expectations for artists and audiences alike. We thank all those who contribute and who continue to be part of its formidable progress into the future
Maureen Cahill, Director Glass Artists’ Gallery
Over the past nine years, the Ranamok Glass Prize, is surely one of the best-kept secrets on the international contemporary glass scene. Under the beady collector’s eye of its now familiar magpie logo, this luminous road show convenes all that a discerning panel of four judges agree to be the year’s best work in contemporary glass from Australia and New Zealand. And dependably, once again, they have done an excellent job.
The work on view here is consistently of the highest quality, and evidences real energy and excitement on many levels - in terms of its range and diversity; its aesthetic ambition; its openness, and inclusiveness; and its technical achievement. For all this shared range and diversity, as was clearly evident with last year’s show, Ranamok 2003 holds a remarkable degree of coherence, and would appear to add up to something tangibly more than the sum of its constituent parts.
That is to say, it seems to represent a distinctive and recognisable creative community of glass interests in this part of the southern hemisphere, backed in turn by the formidable commitment of Andy Plummer and Maureen Cahill, and underwritten by Whitehaven Coal Limited with support from an impressive range of partners and corporate sponsors.
The formative role of glass departments in Higher Education institutions also reads like a continuous signature throughout; and that of the artist associations, and Craft institutions, completes what amounts to a critical consortium of commitments — each informing this self-evidently vibrant sector of what is increasingly these days referred to as ‘the creative industries’.
Ranamok is a celebration of sheer visual energy in glass. The cool mineral excitement of this wide-ranging show is alive with colour incidents and sudden optical events arising from the most sophisticated relationships of form and surface, employing multiple, and often contrasting, techniques within the span of a single object.
Andrew Brewerton Principal of Dartington College of Arts, UK (2003)