In its metamorphosis from a dangerously hot and volatile state to a cool, reflective and glittering solidity, glass is the most chameleon and seductive of materials.

At the forefront of the Australian studio glass movement since the 1970s, Nick Mount became inspired to make glass his medium during a formative visit to the Venini factory at Murano in Venice, where he witnessed 'the spirit and the passion of the glassworkers' connection with their material.' Filtered through an Australian sensibility, this seminal influence, in combination with the dynamism and experimentation of the American glass artist Dick Marquis has continued to inform Mount's glass practice.

Begun in 1997, the ever-evolving Scent Bottle series has now monopolised his attention for a greater period than any other single body of work. Referencing a history of such receptacles, Mount has shifted the primary focus to the scent bottle itself, thereby redressing an historical imbalance, in which the vessel played a secondary role to its more precious contents. Un Nouveau Souffle, Mount's first Parisian exhibition brings together a representative selection of these sculptural pieces - from the earlier squat and rather more restrained forms, to the soaring, fluid and brilliantly coloured scent bottles of recent years,
with their risky, vertiginous, punctuation mark-like flourishes.

For the Fire series (2003), exhibited in Thomas Riley Galleries, Cleveland, Ohio, USA, Mount intensified his experimentation with the pencils he has developed specifically to draw on glass. Each colour is applied separately by hand and then fired in order to render the markings permanent. In a tangible reminder of the integral role of fire in the glass making process, pencilled swirls and curlicues of flames appeared to scale and spiral around the stylised, conical stoppers of Fire's scent bottles. The fiery warmth of their red, tangerine and golden hues has made way for the coolness of citrus-green and yellow, the polished aluminium spikes and the inverted forms of the latest New Fire body of work.

Mount's palette is wide ranging, from the relative austerity of monochromal and pastel forms to exuberant outpourings of combinations of dazzling colour. Attention is lavished on details and even monochromal works feature for example, the fluctuating tonal variations of disparate black glass, the surface embellishment of a carved section, a minuscule cane-worked collar or the intricate fineness of a stopper, viewed through a veiling of zanfirico. Playfully counterpointing a murrini section with its drawn facsimile, a recent scent bottle recalls the exquisite 1996 series of Black Murrine, for which he obtained black glass from a wide variety of sources, resulting in a pleasing interplay of black, blue-black and green-black tones.

Like the 1980s series of walking canes, which were a homage to the friggers of factory glass workers, his enduring motif of the plumb-bob - a traditional measuring tool of the mason's trade, reinterpreted by Mount as overscaled stopper forms - is emblematic of his commitment to the artisanal underpinning of his glass practice. For as Mount emphasises, his sculptural forms are derived from both a fundamental engagement with process and the intrinsic qualities of his medium.

Assembling the scent bottle components in a striking symbiosis of the experimental and the historical, he deftly counterbalances transparency with opacity, delicacy with vibrancy and the attenuated with the voluptuous. In Mount's shifting, evolving compositions - wherein he seeks to impart a trace, or more aptly, a scent of their maker - the single immutable element remains the formidable extent of his technical vocabulary.

Wendy Walker, February 2004

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