Alex Seton: Everything was Beautiful, and Nothing Hurt

By Leigh Robb

Faster than light travel, as science fiction authors routinely remind us, has the capacity to warp time, depositing hapless cosmonauts in various dislocated futures and alternate presents. In Alex Seton’s exhibition at The Lock-Up, Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt, the light shed by luxurious modernist chandeliers leaves the audience unfixed in time and uncertain of location. The objects’ pendulous light evokes streaks of tracer fire and a downpour of bombs, but hung at eye level, the dense arrangements of glass tubes also take on a bodily presence, resembling jellyfish-like aliens, whose translucent, glowing forms distort the perception of space. This beautiful and beguiling exhibition has grown out of intense material discovery and is deeply informed by the artist’s historical research, yet it warps and jumbles time.

The title of Seton’s solo exhibition is borrowed from Kurt Vonnegut’s famous semi-autobiographical anti-war science fiction novel, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). While a prisoner of war in a German abattoir, Vonnegut survived the fire-bombing of Dresden; he then spent two decades struggling to make sense of his experience. The resulting novel juxtaposes mordant humour, time travel and alien abductions with the horrors and banalities of the Second World War. When conceiving of his exhibition, Seton recalled re-reading Vonnegut’s book during lockdown; the titular line is the wishful epitaph that the central timetravelling optometrist, Billy Pilgrim, imagined being carved onto his tombstone.

Similarly, Seton’s exhibition illuminates the ambiguous coincidences that collide the horrors of war and artistic creation. In researching Newcastle’s Leonora Glassworks, Seton uncovered the stories of the business’ founders, Joe Vecera, Henry Vecera and Joe Trvdik, three Czechoslovakian master glass blowers who immigrated to Australia in 1936. When the Second World War broke out, they were employed at the ELMA (Electric Lamp Manufactures Australia) lampworks in Newcastle, their skills hijacked to create ‘bombsights’, precision glass devices used on military planes to accurately aim and deploy bombs.1 In 1947, the trio established the Leonora Glassworks in a coal shed which was once part of the Old Lambton coalmine, and in the 1960s and 70s, this business went on to design stunningly sophisticated modernist chandeliers for Anzac Clubs, RSL halls and civic centres for surviving soldiers.2 Around the same time that the war veteran social clubs were being decommissioned in the 1980s and 90s, the Leonora Glassworks also closed its doors.3

Time travel narratives tempt their readers with the hope of redeeming history, the capacity to reorder events according to a gentler logic than mere causality. But with his fatalistic refrain, ‘so it goes,’ Vonnegut depicts history as inescapable, arguing that the present cannot supplant the past. In his novel, The Tralfamadorians, an alien civilisation who abduct Billy Pilgrim, have no perception of time: ‘There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What [they] love in [their] books are the depths of many marvellous moments seen all at one time’.4 In the chandeliers of the Leonora glass blowers, Seton can’t help but see tallboy missiles, raining cluster bombs, and lethal droplets. So it goes.

Seton has carved his career in marble. Over the past twenty years, he has shaped stone to create stunning simulacra: folds of fabric enveloping a body for a sea burial; a crumpled pillowcase; or a damp towel thrown over a railing. Seton demonstrates anatomical verisimilitude in the creased soles of feet, the cartilage of the ear, or a human skull. His sense of history is evident; marble pulls toward the memorial, as he commemorates the everyday by capturing the trace of the absent body or the memory of those now departed.

- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 1969

Making a whole new body of work in glass for the first time, it’s hard to imagine the artist contending with a more contrary medium. One process is subtractive, the other additive. Using fire and breath to inflate a rod of molten glass into a hollow blown form versus employing the cool steel of a point chisel and the force of a hammer to fashion stone. But Seton was ably guided by master glassblowers Tom Rowney, Annette Blair and Katie Ann-Houghton during a residency at Canberra Glassworks.

The nine extraordinary new glass sculptures Seton has produced for The Lock-Up perform a type of time travel, summoning modernist ghosts. Each piece explicitly references a chandelier created by the Leonora Glassworks, though Seton’s research has revealed that none of the original pieces are still extant. The centrepiece of the exhibition, Trying to Reinvent Themselves and Their Universe, which illuminates the main gallery, is an homage to the chandeliers of the Australia New Zealand Bank Head Office in Sydney. The five alien lights appear to hover throughout the long, darkened space. From each copper fitting, eleven striated glass droplets cascade. The incongruous, anachronistic surrounds of The Lock-Up, originally the holding cells of a nineteenth century police station, remind us of Vonnegut’s prisoner of war camps. In the work Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt, installed in the Yard, 109 amber and clear diamond-point moulded glass pieces hover like a cloud above marble fragments, evoking ruined European capitals, prostrate beneath a shower of bombs.

In Cell F, The Amber of this Moment is a tribute to a piece Leonora Glassworks made for the North Sydney Anzac Memorial Club in the late 1960s. These forty-eight hollow droplets describe a volume of air, capturing a collection of suspended breaths. Working in glass has given Seton licence to move away from the figurative, but the impulse to memorialise remains. Rather than the trace of the body hewn from stone, vanished exhalations are remembered in glass.

Seton’s sensibility could be described at Vonnegutian: staunchly anti-war and trying to find a way to rflect on its horror and absurdity without glorifying it. The same techniques and materials that were used to build bombsights are now employed to fashion new glass chandeliers whose pendulous forms echo the shape of missiles, the jagged burst of light of an exploding bomb, or the drop of a heavy tear. These works are a tribute to the Leonora glassblowers and to a community disaffected by war, but they do not elide history in their memorialisation. As Vonnegut writes in SlaughterhouseFive ‘there is nothing intelligent to say about massacre’.5 Where there are no words to make sense of the tragedy of war, could there be light and shadow to hold a space to remember? Seton has harnessed fire to create objects of enduring light.

ALEX SETON, EVERYTHING WAS BEAUTIFUL AND NOTHING HURT, 7 DEC 2022 – 5 FEB 2023, THE LOCK-UP, NEWCASTLE

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