ANU Visual Arts graduate with honours John White working at the Canberra Glassworks in Kingston. Photo: Jeffrey Chan
It's a classic Canberra tale - at least in the art world.
A man leaves school early to become a cabinetmaker, works in Fyshwick, leaves town to live in Melbourne, moves with his wife to the South Coast for a sea change, sets up an organic alpaca farm, lasts two years, comes back to Canberra and goes to art school.
The story is far more convoluted than that, of course, but the moment that led John White to taking up a residency at Canberra Glassworks was not.
John White's Silence.
He visited Glassworks some years ago to see an exhibition by then creative director Clare Belfrage and recalls being so inspired that he did a couple of weekend glass-blowing workshops through CIT.
''I came home and said to [my wife] Ruth, 'I want to go to art school'. So I did,'' he said. His wife ended up catching the bug as well, and the two studied side by side and completed their degrees together.
And, while his journey to Glassworks was filled with many twists and turns, he has lately returned to his roots when it comes to incorporating other media into his work.
White's father had first arrived here in 1964 to take up a job in the printing press at The Canberra Times.
White's first apprenticeship, in the 1980s, was at the now long-defunct fun park Canberry Fair, in Canberra's north.
''I was doing restoration of antique furniture and reproduction. It was based on a cottage craft idea, so there were a lot of crafty things like tapestry and quilt making, weaving and that sort of stuff,'' he said.
''It had two or three starts with different iterations because it didn't quite work out. [The owner] basically went bust and I moved into a different furniture shop out at Fyshwick.''
Today, he is using antique hand tools as inspiration for his work, especially tools relating to measurement.
''In my honours year last year, I started to venture into the other departments at art school. I went back into woodworking, and started using their machinery and that sort of thing, developing my ideas,'' he said, pointing to a glass pitcher infused with timber.
''I was talking about the workbench and hand tools and the relationship with shadow boards - the idea of a shed in the sense of past heritage and what all those stories mean, old tools with patina and residue from people's hands. They're part of my work - my inspiration came from the negative space of some of these tools.''
His father, who is now retired, helps him by combing flea markets for antique tools, many of which make their way into his work, as shapes or concepts.
He said being part of Glassworks' artist in residency program, along with two art students from Adelaide, had given him a chance to move away from the confines of formal study.
''It's just given me the opportunity to break away from the university and not have to worry about assignments and having to prove those situations,'' he said.
''It's given me the chance to sit back, talk to some fantastic people outside in the real world, work on some ideas and chase those things I was thinking about.''
White's work was recently selected as a finalist in the 2014 biennial National Student Art Glass Prize exhibition, showing at the National Art Glass Gallery in Wagga Wagga in April.
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