The Glass Workshop at the ANU School of Art and Design is pleased to announce the latest winners of the Christine and Stephen Procter Fellowship. Honouring Christine and Stephen’s shared vision of international exchange and travel, the new fellows will build on Stephen’s legacy of highly crafted glass, optics and light with a distinctive contemporary interpretation. The selected Fellows are Vicky Higginson and Anna May Kirk. 

Whilst Vicky Higginson’s folk-futurist glasswork is a metaphorical lens to explore mental health and healing, Anna May Kirk is literally making lenses through which to understand more-than-human planetary events. 

International Fellow, Vicky Higginson, is a freelance artist based in Edinburgh, UK. She uses blown and cold-worked glass combined with vernacular materials to explore ideas of culture, ritual and personal narrative. Vicky creates visually intriguing objects through investigations of coded mark-making on unsettling sculptural compositions. Taking their forms from historical medical implements such as violet ray machines, ear trumpets and anaesthesia inhalers, her Coping Mechanisms are impossible devices to treat emotional ailments. This work was commissioned for the Jerwood Art Fund Makers Open and now in the permanent collection of Aberdeen Art Gallery, UK. During her ANU Glass Workshop residency (February – April 2024), Vicky looks forward to being inspired by Australia’s rich history, making and contemporary craft.  

Anna May Kirk is an emerging multi-disciplinary artist, curator and creative producer based on Gadigal land. Her winning proposal for the domestic Procter Fellowship, Year Without a Sun, explores the eruption of Mt Tambora in Indonesia. This period from 1815-1818 is now viewed as a climate change case study for the cultural, social and economic impacts of sudden temperature and weather shifts. Through a residency at ANU, she will experiment with melting black volcanic sand from the site of this historical climate event into optical camera lenses. Kirk will then travel to Greenland with 'Satellite Institute' Satellite Institute to film its climatically impacted landscapes through these lenses and optical sculptures. In doing so, the past climate catastrophe caused by the eruption of Mt Tambora is reanimated as an eye through which to view present climate change. Anna’s residency in the Glass Workshop will commence in 2025. 

The selection committee for the 2024 Fellowship included: Bree Pickering, Director, National Portrait Gallery, Anna Rohan Procter, Procter Fellowship patron, and Dr Jeffrey Sarmiento, Senior Lecturer in the Glass Workshop, ANU School of Art & Design.