Modernism’s dreams of the future may have become the stuff of our past, but through her jewellery, Blanche Tilden recognises in its most utopian moments an idea which still has the power to enchant us: that of a building made of glass. Her pieces are not emptily nostalgic objects, however. Rather, we might read in them a new idea about our relationship with built spaces: her structures reverse the traditional idea of a building as an envelope for bodies and instead, propose a relationship in which the body carries her structures with it, a sort of talisman for a contemporary nomadic life in which the webs of glass and silver create small prisms of light, not quite material, and resonant with our own dreams of other possible futures.

Anne Brennan
ANU School of Art