AMILTON D E S I G N G L A S S The artwork of Jeffrey Hamilton

2018 in Review

XX Mon. YYYY

Its been a big year. The continuing project for new stained glass windows in the clerestory of St Peter's Anglican Church at East Maitland, NSW for which I installed two windows in 2016 and two in 2017, required three windows this year.

I did manage to squeeze in a solo exhibition at m2 Gallery in Surry Hills mid-September, just prior to the late October installation at East Maitland. I was rather desperate to exhibit as this was my first solo show in over a decade. I am pleased it was so well received, despite falling on the same weekend as Sydney Contemporary at Carriageworks.

The beginning of the year saw the team rebuild and install 12x decorative leadlight windows from the Oxford Room of St Mathias' Anglican Church in Paddington, having excavated the original windows the previous December. These leadlights were in the worst condition I have ever come across, and everyone in the Parish community was thrilled with the result.

With the St Matthias project underway I was concentrating on completing a new window for Wesley Uniting Church in Forrest, ACT with a very specific (and consequently rather difficult) brief. Featuring an angel bearing a lit candle, it was installed end of January after a long gestation.

Also in Jan/Feb I made a residential fanlight for a couple in Newtown which featured a lyrebird. They own a bush block up on the Central Coast of NSW frequented by lyrebirds and wanted to make special note of that in the Newtown property.

As soon as St Matthias was completed mid-February, the studio got underway with restoration of two lancets from a 5x lancet set of ornamental stained glass in what is now the Chinese Christian Church in Milson's Point. Completed in 1888, this handsome Victorian Gothic building was formerly a Congregational Church and the windows, on the point of collapse until we got them out, are quite pretty.

While all that was going on, I got away for two weeks in April/May with my boyfriend to Vietnam, travelling to Saigon, Da Nang and Nha Trang; it was my first trip to an Asian country and I had a great time.

So yeah, 2018 was a big year, finishing on a busy session of installations for a residential client in Balmain, restoration of a John Ashwin window from St James Catholic Church in Glebe and removal of the Main Hall windows at St Matthias Paddington, to be rebuilt early in 2019. There were various other smaller jobs throughout the year as well, and in amongst it all, slowly but surely my friend Jon Doe and I made progress on a collaborative work which will be constructed in January for the exhibition titled INTERCHANGE at M16 Gallery in Griffith, ACT in February 2019. This exhibition will be a satellite show concurrent with the Ausglass/NZGAS CoLab Conference in Whanganui, NZ