Craft / Pink Moon by Cobi Cockburn. At Canberra Glassworks, until September 22. Reviewed by MEREDITH HINCHLIFFE.

Cobi Cockburn uses coloured light as a medium, much as she uses glass as a medium.

She has been exploring the emotional and spiritual connections to the colour white for the last 20 years. Cockburn was awarded an honours degree from the ANU in 2005 and awarded a masters of visual arts from the Sydney College of the Arts in 2016

The works in Pink Moon evoke the experience of feeling and being. We are told in the catalogue by Aimee Frodsham, who curated the exhibition, that Pink Moon is a tea rose that flowers in April in the northern hemisphere. It is a soft, pink bloom, and marks the beginning of spring. We are then told a moving story about a rose that has special and very personal meaning for Cockburn.

US artist Dan Flavin created minimal art installations in the ’60s, using only commercially available fluorescent light as his medium. Cockburn, with her skills at surface treatment and knowledge of neon, enable her to create far more nuanced works, which appear soft and velvety. She fabricates the glass and the neon.

In Study of Light 1-5, in neon and glass and hung in the main gallery, we see long, pale, vertical objects in neon and glass, which emit a soft glow. Moving from pale green to pale orange, they are breathtaking in their apparent simplicity.

Another single, vertical object is titled Spire, located in the foyer, also in neon and glass. It glows quietly, and could easily be overlooked by impatient viewers. A pair of works, titled Murmuration – Charcoal and Murmuration – Fawn are from 2019. All these works are seemingly simple, and draw your eye in to examine the complex pattern of vertical and horizontal glass.

Cockburn’s work is lyrical and poetical, the pale colours and refined line – whether straight or circular – emphasise the apparent lack of complexity. But that complexity takes skill and knowledge and talent.

This exhibition is contemplative, gentle but strong in its presentation.

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