Giles Bettison Australia, 1966-.

Giles Bettison is an Australian glass artist known for his intricate and colorful murrine glasswork. He was born in 1966 in Melbourne, Australia. Bettison's interest in glass began when he was studying ceramics at the Chisholm Institute of Technology in Melbourne. He was drawn to the transparency and optical qualities of glass, and began experimenting with it in his work. After completing his studies, Bettison moved to Adelaide, where he worked as an artist and technician at the Jam Factory, a contemporary craft and design studio. In the early 1990s, Bettison began to develop his signature style of murrine glasswork. Murrine is an ancient glassmaking technique that involves layering and fusing together thin rods of colored glass, then slicing the resulting cylinder to reveal a cross-section of the pattern. Bettison's murrine pieces are characterized by their intricate, kaleidoscopic designs, which are made up of hundreds or even thousands of individual elements. In 1998, he won the Tom Malone Prize for Contemporary Glass at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. In 2004, he was awarded the prestigious Rakow Commission by the Corning Museum of Glass in New York, which resulted in a major exhibition of his work at the museum in 2006. He has also been a finalist for the Stanislav Libensky Award in the Czech Republic and the Bombay Sapphire Prize in the UK. In addition to his work as a glass artist, Bettison has taught and lectured at numerous institutions, including the Australian National University, the Canberra Glassworks, and Pilchuck Glass School in the United States.