Short Conveyor

Blanche Tilden
born Australia, 1968

Short Conveyor  1997 (from the series Lightmoves)
glass (heat resistant), titanium, 925 sterling silver
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with the assistance of Lou and Mary Senini, 1997

Tilden has always been fascinated by repetition and gradation; lightness; precision and mechanical movement; and the inherent beauty of glass and metals. Her unique repurposing of industrial and salvaged materials, from her earliest to her most recent works, proposes redefinitions of value and meaning.

The beautiful economy of industrial models and their moving parts stimulated a number of key early works, including Short Conveyor, 1997. With its emphatic alternation of glass cylinders and flat titanium bars, this necklace gives a radically abbreviated account of the action of the standard conveyor belt.

—Julie Ewington