Revitrification
Matthew Curtis
5 – 15 November 2026
Location | Australian National Botanic Gardens, Clunies Ross Street, Acton ACT 2601
Opening Hours | Monday – Sunday | 8:00am–5:00pm
Entry | Free | No bookings required
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Revitrification is a public artwork by Matthew Curtis that challenges why energy intensive glass, often made from pristine beach sand, ends up in landfill. Embedded with high energy during manufacturing, this material typically becomes unseen and unproductive once discarded. Revitrification proposes a circular methodology in which waste glass becomes a valuable raw material within creative practice, demonstrating how discarded material can enhance our experience of light and materiality in the city.
Installed on the Botanic Gardens' Friends Lawn as part of the Craft + Design Canberra Festival, the work presents modular architectural elements as temporary outdoor sculptures, secured within laser cut stainless steel frames. Surface textures have been developed to celebrate the vision and legacy of the Gardens and Seedbank, with freestanding sculptural objects reflecting on the delightful details of architectural structures found in nature.
Working with salvaged window glass, Curtis embraces the material's limitations, including its green tint and unknown chemistry, as part of the project's conceptual framework. Through casting, moulding and blowing, the work yields outcomes ranging from transparent lagoon like finishes to jade like opacity, harnessing devitrification as a point of material and aesthetic interest.
This pilot project will divert approximately two tonnes of glass from landfill, serving as a pathfinder for sustainable processes and material lifecycles that other industries and cities can follow.
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Matthew Curtis is a glass artist whose rigorous material-based practice centres on the shifting qualities of glass. Introduced to glassblowing through an informal apprenticeship at Denizen Glass in Sydney in the early 1990s, he has since developed an experimental approach that extends traditional techniques through unconventional processes and sustained research.
Curtis works from a home studio in Queanbeyan, NSW, where his practice has evolved to focus on reclaimed architectural glass, reflecting a deepening commitment to environmental sustainability. His blown and cast objects capture transparent hues that fade and gather in intensity, while his current work investigates margins and boundaries: subtle intersections that magnify the minutiae of biological structures and patterns. For Curtis, these intersections become metaphors for how objects and ideas might yield and accommodate each other, fitting together harmoniously.
His work is held in significant private and public collections internationally, including the Corning Museum of Glass, the Saxe Collection at the De Young Museum (San Francisco), Ernt Stiftung (Germany), the National Gallery of Australia, the Wagga Wagga National Glass Art Collection, Parliament House, and the Murdoch Children's Research Institute. His large-scale illuminated public sculpture Field of Light was commissioned for Canberra. He has been selected for prestigious residencies and prizes including the Wheaton Arts Creative Glass Fellowship (New Jersey), the Corning Museum of Glass International Artist in Residence (New York), the Canberra Glassworks Fellowship, and the Fuse Prize.
Images | Matthew Curtis in his studio 2026 | Photography by 5 Foot Photography