Everything was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt / Alex Seton

In this exhibition of new work, multidisciplinary artist Alex Seton will explore the possibilities of combining glass and stone contemplating memory, forgetting, and loss with the passing of time.

In Everything was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt, Alex Seton creates a series of glass installations that contemplate memory, forgetting, and loss with the passing of time.

Created specially for the cells of The Lock-Up, Seton presents a series of chandeliers in tribute to those made by Newcastle’s discontinued Leonora Glassworks. Each piece riffs upon chandeliers that were ubiquitous in the entranceways of clubs and RSLs of post-World War II Australia.

The title of the show refers to Kurt Vonnegut’s singular anti-war novel about the fire bombing of Dresden that dislocates linear time. The founders of the Leonora glassworks started out making aircraft bomb-sights, but flourished when they moved into art glass.

Glass exists in its own special state of matter. It is a solid produced by cooling molten material that still holds its liquid memory. Seton contrasts the layered geological time evident in his favoured material of marble with this captive moment in glass.