FROM BROKEN, THROUGH LIGHT, TO HOPE.
An immersive thought-provoking group show featuring works by Ilan El, Hedy Ritterman & Aly Indermühle.
Wars, social injustice, and natural catastrophes have sullied humanity and reshaped our planet. The political, social and cultural events change our perception of the world, manifesting in personal and global crises. Through recording, interpreting and imagining, the group presents evocative works that encourage reflection on one’s role within a fragile existence.
Amidst imagery and sculptures of shattered glass objects, a battalion of hand-blown glass cannon vases fires beams of light casting a luminous floral cloud of hope, while a collection of intimate artist’s books guide the fragile world of subjective experience.
The installation invites reflection on the interplay between destruction and creation, fragility and resilience, and the power of art to inspire hope and transformation.
Host | Glowing Structures
Glowing Structures is a passionate team of internationally award winning designers, creating bespoke and architectural lighting designs and installations for the built environment.
Of the many facets of design we are involved in, the creative lighting of art, form and sculpture is an area we are extremely passionate about. In February 2022 Glowing Structures launched what we believe is a world first creative art gallery celebrating light.
The Gallery is a place in which local artists and designers can collaborate to use the tools of light to enhance and embellish both art and everyday pieces alike.
Explore ways in which the characteristics of form, texture and colour are enhanced, maximising the potential of each piece through the use of a bespoke lighting solution.
We showcase various artists, lighting techniques and creative concepts and welcome all creatives and visitors to experience the gallery and explore how lighting can be used to alter one’s perception of a space or piece. A place where trial and error are part of the journey, having fun and celebrating light and new discoveries!
Welcome!
Ilan El
A multidisciplinary designer originally from Israel, Ilan trained and practised as an architect before relocating to Australia in 2005 to enrol in RMIT’s Industrial Design Masters program. In 2010, Ilan established ILANEL Design Studio, a product design practice specialising in designing and producing bespoke luminaires and large-scale light-based installations.
Interested in the experiential quality of light and its potential for positive psychological and emotional effects, Ilan explores the visible spectrum’s colours to create works with playful, interactive, and automated elements. Ilan’s installations and works have been showcased at Melbourne Design Week annually since 2017, Globelight 2013 to 2016, the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2020 Triennial, and a solo show Colours of Light at Linden Gallery in March 2022.
Some of Ilan’s notable large-scale commissions include an interactive lighting installation, ‘39 Steps’, at the Justin Art House Museum (JAHM), a 13-meter-long multi-tiered chandelier at Melbourne’s Royal Bank Chambers, and bespoke luminaires for high-end hotels and private residences worldwide. In recent years, Ilan has been exploring the use of coloured illumination to express Luminism in the present zeitgeist. His latest work challenges our perceptions of the world around us by saturating black and white photographs of familiar vistas with coloured illumination, stimulating emotional responses.
CANONS OF HOPE תותחים של תקוה
Limited Edition of Twelve. Each is one of a kind.
Cannons of Hope is a poignant expression of Ilan El’s military service experiences as a soldier during the Gulf War and a testament to the strength of the human spirit in the face of conflict.
With a long history of military combat, Israeli soldiers, when presented with such violence, sing a famous song, “Flowers in the Barrel”, the heartfelt lyrics of which express a hopeful longing for a time of peace, where cannons are loaded with flowers instead of missiles.
Cannons of Hope creates a powerful metaphor for the resilience of the human spirit in the face of destruction. Using El’s highly acclaimed Cannon Vase range as its basis, this iteration of distorted vases, melted by overheating and deformed by stress, fire beams of light, casting a luminous cloud of hope and determination.
The use of glass as a medium highlights the delicate balance between control and unpredictability, characterising the creative process. Glass has its own will and yet is inherently fragile and vulnerable, creating a deeper layer of meaning to the work. The use of light expresses hope in darkness, where one state’s experience relies on the juxtaposition of the other.
Set within the context of Fragile El’s sculptural installation is a powerful and moving tribute to the human spirit, highlighting the fragility and resilience that portrays our experience of the world, speaking to the enduring power of hope and the transformative potential of art & design.
Hedy Ritterman
Hedy Ritterman has academic achievements in psychology, design, photography and fine arts and has integrated these with her work/life experiences to carefully articulate her relationship to the world. Themes of love & loss, memory & memorialisation, rituals & identity underpin her projects. Her large scale, site-specific installations, using assemblage, soundscapes, photography and the architectural spaces themselves have been exhibited at Jewish Museum Australia, VIC; Museum of Australian Democracy, ACT, local council and commercial galleries, public and domestic spaces.
Hedy has won the prestigious Human Justice Award in the 63rd Blake Prize, The Linden Postcard Prize and the CCP Kodak Still Life Award. Many other photographic works have been shortlisted for numerous prizes including the Josephine Ulrick & Win Schubert Photography Prize (QLD), Olive Cotton Award (NSW), and National Photographic Purchase Award (NSW).
Hedy is co-founder of the not-for-profit art collective, The Contemporary Collective (TCC), that provides a platform for artists to critically engage with issues of cultural significance. She is also director of HedsPaceProjects, a production entity that facilitates art in alternative spaces.
Her work is held in The Cunningham Dax Collection, Royal Melbourne Hospital Collection as well as numerous local and overseas corporate and private collections.
STILL LIFE IN THE BROKEN
I am drawn to the potential of everyday objects that have been preloved, left behind or discarded. To me, these items are like orphaned talismans that tell stories about history, human touch, culture, and materiality. I use the inherent sculptural potential of the objects to create art that is animated by the aesthetics of chance. It’s a kind of improvisation, like notes in jazz, where fragmentation and reassembly become a new creation.
My artistic process is centred on the use of found materials, which I see as a way to recontextualize everyday objects and challenge looking beyond the familiar. I’m inspired by these objects and seek to bring them to life in new and unexpected ways. Each of my designs is guided by dualities that exist all around us. I explore themes such as order/chaos, natural/man-made, geometric/formless, opaque/transparent, lightness/weight, tangible/intangible, and whole/broken. By unravelling these oppositional forces, through the materials used and their unlikely configurations, I seek to create works that provoke viewers to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. My work for this exhibition, Fragile, was triggered by the September 2021 earthquake in Victoria, which caused breakages to many of the glass pieces in the installation, In My Mother’s House. The broken glass pieces were salvaged and used as my ‘palette’ in the making of these new artworks. The installation consists of three discrete components: Still Life in The Broken, Shardstones, and Un-Wholey Relics, which work together to encourage viewers to see renewed potential in the aftermath of destruction.
I invite you, the viewers, to become active participants in my works by using available flashlights, playing with reflections, refractions and shadow ‘drawings’, and energising the pieces with your movements and light projections.
Create your own images from these interactions and please share them on our Instagram feed @fragile.mdw2023
Acknowledgements:
Deby Margulos, Leora Hart, Cliff Burtt, Peter Hatzapavlis (Final Grade Printing), Joe Ross
(Melbourne Safety Glass), Luke Ingram (Arten Framing), Jordan Marani, Kirsty Macaffee,
Linda Roach, Linda Wachtel, Ilan El, Aly Indermuhle, Malin Vannemyr & Adam Deguara
(Glowing Structures Gallery), and as always, my supportive, loving family and friends.
Aly Indermuhle
Artist Aly Indermühle is an artist whose practice encompasses the engagement of digital and physical spaces through color and light, exploring themes of emotion, memory, and experience. Her light installations have been displayed in prominent events such as VIVID Light 2016 -2018 and The Australian Open. In 2015, Aly received the Sculpture by the Sea Award at the National Art School, and has since been commissioned for projects both nationally and internationally. Her most recent installation was for TWT Property at New Life in Bondi Junction in 2020.
Aly’s career has spanned multiple disciplines, including 3D animation, artistic creation, sculpture, lighting, texturing, and theme park design. She created and operated the United States Air Force’s first fully functional Animation Studio and worked for MTV Productions Switzerland. Aly completed her Master of Fine Arts at the National Art School in Sydney, Australia, and currently serves as the Secretary of the Colour Society of Australia NSW.
Melbourne Design Week
Melbourne Design Week (MDW) celebrates design in an annual 11-day program of talks, tours, exhibitions, launches, installations and workshops across Australia’s design capital.
The program champions design through promoting its broad array of disciplines, including: communication design, industrial design, service design, gaming, architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, urban design, fashion, craft and functional art. What also unites these disciplines in MDW is a focus on experimentation, innovation and ideas that enrich the world.
The curation of the program is led by the NGV Department of Contemporary Design and Architecture team; Ewan McEoin, Simone LeAmon and Myf Doughty alongside Timothy Moore, Director of Sibling Architecture.
MDW is an initiative of the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria, and delivered by the NGV. The program is built on the enthusiastic engagement and participation of the design sector and the general public. Since 2017 the program has grown in scope and scale from just under 100 programs in 2017 to over 300 in 2022 making it Australia’s leading and largest design event.
Please visit the Melbourne Design Week website for more info.
