DISCOVERY: Bronte Cormican-Jones

Sculptor Bronte Cormican-Jones is inspired by the built environment and its material counterparts. She works between artisanal craft traditions and industrial manufacture, presenting highly conceptual artworks that encourage audiences to achieve a new awareness of their own bodies in space. The primary elements of Cormican-Jones’ sculptural output—glass, light, and space—were fittingly at work to facilitate our engagement.

Bronte Cormican-Jones, Of line, of light, 2024, neon and steel, dimensions variable. Photographed by Kevin Miller

Cormican-Jones is often away from home, the practical realities of her artmaking. After graduating in 2022 with first-class honours from Sydney College of the Arts, she has participated in many residencies both locally and internationally including at JamFactory, Tarndanya / Adelaide; Canberra Glassworks, Kamberri / Canberra; and the Pilchuck Glass School in Washington State, USA. Cormican-Jones remarks on the immense generosity artisan communities bring to imparting techniques compounded over generations to her in these forums. “We must not let this knowledge slip through our fingers,” says Cormican-Jones with urgency.  

Cormican-Jones has gravitated towards slumped, kiln-formed, cold-worked, cast, and blown glass methods, as well as metalwork and neon light bending. Each of her processes requiring specialist facilities and the support of skilled assistants.

Though Cormican-Jones is indebted to studio glass-making traditions, she chooses to situate her practice within modernist art histories, citing sculpture as her discipline and glass as the principal medium. Within twentieth century art Cormican-Jones can locate a vocabulary to explore contemporary themes relating to the self, architecture, and public spaces. Artists such as Richard Serra and Dan Flavin offer exciting possibilities to Cormican-Jones, particularly in the way they fabricated steel and glass into large-scale sculptures. But also, how their works posed spatial conundrums in urban settings, which frequently divided, illuminated, and reflected spaces, provoking a bodily awareness.

In 2024, Cormican-Jones was commissioned by the Canberra Art Biennial to create a major site-specific installation at the National Film and Sound Archive. For this, the artist conceived Of line, of light, a dazzling series of constructional geometries sculpted from steel and manipulated tubes of lighting. The work had unmistakable echoes of the forecourt site’s surrounding buildings: hemispherical, rectangular, and trapezoidal forms nodded to Roy Grounds’ distinctive Shine Dome, the Ovolo Nishi Hotel, and the Archive’s own entrance. Participants were invited to move throughout the lawn and notice how the forms prompted two or three-dimensional readings, based on their changing relationship to the artwork around them. As night fell, the visual primacy of the steel frames was eclipsed by the mighty luminescent, hand-forged neon components affixed to their perimeters.

Cormican-Jones solo exhibition The Way the Light Hits the Building at Canberra Glassworks’ Smokestack Gallery is influenced by the artist’s recent travels abroad, which provided her the opportunity to absorb international approaches to her craft, and unhurried experiences of global cities vastly different in their organisation and appearance to her own. How far Cormican-Jones is willing to expand her sculptural relationship with glass requires a closer look.

EXHIBITION
The Way the Light Hits the Building
21 August – 26 October 2025
Canberra Glassworks, Smokestack Gallery

This profile was published in Artist Profile, Issue 70, 2025. A revised version of this article has been published in Artist Profile’s Monthly Newsletter, 6th of September 2025.

Image courtesy of the artist