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When studying visual arts at Sydney College of the Arts, Billy Crellin became enamoured with the world of glass for its immediacy and physicality.
After graduating he moved to Europe, where Billy spent several years refining his hot glass skills across jobs in Germany, Denmark and the Czech Republic, collectively grounding his practice in both traditional technique and experimental thinking.
‘My work sits somewhere between historical reference and material speculation,’ says Billy. ‘In essence, I’m interested in how the glass I use came to be and where its material life will take it. The forms often reference early glassmaking techniques or natural processes — molten, geological, or eroded states — while also questioning what glass might become in the future.’
Today, Billy owns Studio Dokola in West Footscray, which supports a host of grassroots practitioners working in hot glass. His days are a combination of admin, experimenting through his own creative work, producing functional pieces, and running public glassblowing classes.
‘Teaching has become a significant way to engage with networks, the people I’ve met through teaching have been hugely influential to my career and glass studios need a broader community to exist,’ he says.
Every day is different, but on a commercial production day, Billy and his two team members could make anywhere from 20-40 small pieces. For more complex or sculptural works, there might only be a few pieces produced, or even just one if requiring multiple stages.
‘Although the making process is immediate, careful preparation of furnace materials and equipment schedules go into aligning works for success,’ says Billy.
Like any artist, Billy has refined his style over time to embrace imagination to confidently stand on its own. He explains, ‘Fundamentally, glassblowing, and similarly most crafts, is traditionally learned through mimicry. Returning to a more naive, early-career sensibility has allowed me to break from that model and rebuild the practice as a conceptual artistic language.’
The pace of the medium keeps him inspired, requiring a real time response to regulate molten matter in accordance with cooling and gravitational forces.
‘Things go wrong regularly, but that’s built into the process,’ Billy says. ‘Sometimes it’s a technical failure, other times it leads to a new idea. You learn to adapt quickly, and occasionally those “mistakes” become the most interesting outcomes.’
Billy’s favourite pieces to create sit just outside of repeatability — where there’s enough structure to guide the process, but still room for variation — such as his sculptural works from my Speculative Future solo exhibition at Craft Victoria from May 1 to June 14.
Follow Billy’s Instagram stories as he documents developing a series of works for a residency at Canberra Glassworks.
‘A key part of the residency involves working with rejected KeepCup glass, addressing the technical challenges of recycling it for future use in Studio Dokola’s public classes,’ he says.
Billy will also be presenting at Melbourne Design Week exhibitions, alongside several other Studio Dokola artists.
‘Victoria has been incredibly supportive of my practice,’ he says. ‘There’s a strong intersection here between craft, design and architecture, and a real appetite for engaging with material processes, which is a glassblower’s niche.’
