Blanche Tilden is a Melbourne based artist who graduated from the Canberra School of Art with a Bachelor of Art (Visual) specialising in Glass, followed by a Graduate Diploma of Art in Gold and Silversmithing. She went on train with renowned designer Su san Cohn as part of the Australia Council Traineeship program from 1996-97 and is has recently completed her PhD at Australian National University, Canberra.

Tilden’s work has been included in major exhibitions internationally, inluding Unexpected Pleasures at NGV and London Design Museum, the Rigg Award (2006) and Melbourne Now (2013) both at NGV and SOFA Chicago. Her work is held in many pretigious collections including the Corning Museum of Glass, New York, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, Toledo Art Museum, Ohio and Australian state and regional public galleries.

In addition to her solo practice, Tilden has undertaken major commissions and collaborative projects, among them several projects with Australian designer Mary Featherstone and artist Maree Clarke. Tilden has developed a unique approach to her materials, in particular glass, which she explores both as a material for jewellery making and a universal metaphor. Her fascination with mechanical devices, fuelled by a desire to understand how things work, continually inspires her work.

A major retrospective exhibition Ripple Effect: a 25 year survey, curated by Jason Smith, Director of Geelong Gallery, toured Australia between 2020 and 2022. This first comprehensive survey of Tilden’s career included historical and contemporary works loaned from numerous public and private collections. To mark this career event, Tilden produced a range of new limited edition works, reinterpreting previous jewellery pieces to create new forms that expanded on her preoccupations with value, mechanical movement, and industrial and architectural uses of glass, translating something of the macro immensity of the built and material world to the intimacy of the jewellery object.

As a child, I operated a conveyor belt used to pack the lemons my dad grew on his hobby farm. I knoew how a conveyor belt worked and I knew how to fix it when it broke down. So this elegant interpretation of the seamless, fluid mechanical movement of a conveyor belt held a deep personal meaning for me when I made [Long Conveyor, 1997]. Blanche Tilden