In Studio—

Tom Moore

49In Studio

Tom Moore’s workspace is more akin to a laboratory than an artist’s studio. Glass vessels line the shelves as if beakers; hybrid forms and propositional characters – part animal, part plant, part machine – jostle for space on any horizontal surface available; filing cabinets and drawers reveal piles of componentry, sketchbooks and sculptural fragments to be added to at a later stage.

The unconventional space is attached to Moore’s home in suburban Adelaide which he shares with his wife Rosie and their young family, and it says much of the glass artist’s wider engagement with his chosen medium of glass. Indeed, for Moore work is still a consistent source of astonishment. ‘The way that light is transmitted through coloured glass is really mind-blowing – it’s such a visceral feeling of colour’, he o�ers at one point during the afternoon.

‘It’s like when you learn to weld, you feel like you have this almost superhuman power, because a normal human being doesn’t have that ability to transform that material. It’s not something you can just do.’ A grin. ‘And it’s the same thing with glass – working with hot glass is such a di�erent experience to the one we have with glass in day-to-day life. It’s almost alarming how di�erent it is.’

Moore’s work has long navigated a terrain outside commonplace experience. Although often domestic in scale, his meticulously realised glass sculptures and their theatrical environments possess a rare sense of playfulness and wonder. His hybrid ‘bird cars’, ‘picklemobiles’ and other happily incongruous amalgams embrace the Surrealist tradition as much as they ri� on its more lowbrow and pop counterparts, such as Reg Mombassa and the more lateral incarnations of children’s illustration and television cartoons.

‘From the beginning, I was making these hybrid, comical and absurd creatures’, says Moore, whose mother was a children’s librarian and introduced him to scores of classic illustrated books and stories, including Dr Seuss and the work of nineteenth-century children’s author and illustrator Edward Lear (Moore also counts Sesame Street as an influence). ‘Humour depends a lot on incongruity, which is one of the things that the Surrealists were really interested in, and also creating cognitive shifts or shocks. There are a few other things related to humour – like the fantastic, the grotesque and the bizarre – and they’re all really interesting to me.’

Moore’s works aren’t peculiar merely for the sake of it. His fused characters personify a clear thematic and conceptual thread surrounding the ongoing clash between and coalescence of the natural and industrialised worlds. It is no mistake that his PhD pursues a line of investigation via post-humanism, the Anthropocene and the idea of humanity’s reliance on all other life forms. ‘A lot of my work is kind of dealing with this parallel universe where hybrid lifeforms combine plants, animals, people and machines’, he explains of his sculptures which manifest, at least in part, from an ‘existential crisis and feeling of dread’.

Moore is not kidding. In one work, the body of a dead bird becomes the shell of a hybrid plant-car, wheels springing from its wings and saplings sprouting from its breast. ‘There’s an ongoing theme of conflict between birds and cars, which expresses itself in quite an absurd arrangement of elements’, he says.

The artist has plenty of other examples on display in his domestic studio, which essentially acts as a site for planning, design and finer detailing. He opens a drawer to reveal a scattering of glass eyes to be a�ixed to larger works; he flips through one of several sketchbooks in which he hones a work’s basic form, proportions and details with naivest drawings. While Moore has a small kiln onsite, he undertakes the actual glassblowing with the aid of assistants at a specialised hot glass studio at Adelaide’s peak craft and design institution, JamFactory, where he has worked as Production Manager and in various collaborative contexts for almost two decades.

“There are a lot of things you have to do simultaneously, and you have to be able to do it without thinking. It needs dexterity and there’s an element of danger and it’s really quite an unbelievable process. So from the very first time I saw it, I was kind of hooked and knew it was what I wanted to do.”

50 In Studio

‘One of the best things about glassblowing and how it’s taught is that glass artists always need assistants’, he says. ‘I always work with at least one assistant, and as a younger artist I was assisting people who had come a long way already. You can work alone, but it’s very limiting – you need more than two pairs of hands to make anything really ambitious.’

Moore’s experience with the medium runs deep. He witnessed hot glassblowing for the first time as a high school student in Canberra during an open day at the Australian National University’s School of Art. Su�ice to say, he was fascinated by what he saw and was accepted into ANU after high school, where he set about learning the famed Venetian technique which, traditionally, was taught to apprentices as young as eleven years old.

‘You need a teacher who knows what they’re doing and you need a lot of practice’, he says of his craft, smiling. ‘It’s mainly taught by demonstration and by practice. There’s a lot of tacit knowledge that actually isn’t all that transferrable – your body has to learn how to do it. There are a lot of things you have to do simultaneously, and you have to be able to do it without thinking’. A pause. ‘It needs dexterity and there’s an element of danger and it’s really quite an unbelievable process. So from the very first time I saw it, I was kind of hooked and knew it was what I wanted to do. I was just lucky that I was young enough to pick it up.’

The conversation shifts to Self-preservation, 2014, a sculpture included in the exhibition Lurid Beauty: Australian Surrealism and its Echoes at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia. The work is a classic Moore hybrid: a bottle with eyes, encased in a dome with ears, out of which a plant (also with eyes) sprouts. While evoking and humanising the social history of glass and the museum display, the work also points towards the sentience and agency of plant life and the natural world.

Like so many of Moore’s sculptures, Self-preservation is a melding of technique and unbridled imagination. ‘I actually want to say things and represent stories with my work’, urges Moore. ‘I’m interested in narrative, so I look at pure abstraction and I always feel like I want it to say something’, he pauses. ‘I want art to speak to me.’

Dan Rule is a writer, editor and publisher from Melbourne. He is a longstanding visual art columnist and critic for The Saturday Age, a design columnist for The Age, the editor of VAULT magazine and Composite Journal, and the co-director of Perimeter Books, Perimeter Distribution and Perimeter Editions.