Rooted in craft tradition yet wholly elevated in artistic and technical ambition, glass art remains one of the most visually arresting and physically demanding mediums an artist can work in.

Glass holds a fascinating duality: transparent and opaque, fixed and shifting, all surfaces changing with the light that moves through and around them. It is a medium that can speak with or without light through many vantage points, which is precisely what makes it so alive in a collection. 

Otomys represents Madisyn Zabel, a Canberra-based artist whose practice sits at the intersection of craft and digital technology. Working with cast and cold-worked glass forms, Zabel juxtaposes volume and flatness, creating works that explore perceptual reversal, the visual phenomenon in which a form is too ambiguous for the eye to resolve into a single interpretation. Her geometric sculptures generate implied shadows, shift with natural and artificial light and can hold the viewer in a state of uncertainty. Her work has been recognised with the Museum Kunstpalast Jutta Cuny-Franz Foundation Talent Award, the JamFactory FUSE Emerging Artist Prize and as a finalist in both the Tom Malone Prize and the Woollahra Small Sculpture Prize. Watch the film of Madisyn Zabel in her studio here.