After making waves at The Venice Glass Week 2024 with her debut international exhibition, SALTWATERS; Italian-Australian glass artist Sabrina Dowling Giudici is set to once again make a splash in the canal city after securing a position in the prestigious 2025 The Venice Glass Week HUB with her ocean inspired glass work, Phyto.
Dowling Giudici’s work, Phyto was selected by a curatorial committee of experts in the glass sector including Venetian glass historian Rosa Barovier Mentasti, Rainald Franz, Susanne Jøker Johnsen, Jean Blanchaert and Alma Zevi.
The Carnarvon-raised glass artist is one of only 50 international artists to be selected to enter The Hub. This year, she is joined by Australians Anne Clifton and Peter Bowles to be selected to exhibit in the coveted venue. Their work will be on display in the historic Palazzo Loredan in Venice from 13 – 21 September as part of the 2025 iteration of The Venice Glass Week.
“I’m ecstatic to once again be invited to exhibit at The Venice Glass Week. Being surrounded by world-class creativity, and meeting like-minded artists and glass lovers last year was genuinely inspiring,” says Dowling Giudici.
“After the festival last year, I evolved my art practice to include a wider spectrum of stunning glass colours based on rare earths, and insert new techniques like murrine and reticello.”
2025 is shaping up to be a big year for Dowling Gudici. In addition to exhibiting in The HUB at The Venice Glass Week, the Italian-born artist will also be delivering an art-science lecture at the University of Bulgaria in Sofia in September for the International Biennale of Glass.
She has also been chosen as the inaugural artist in the IUCN World Congress Conservation in Abu Dhabi in October, where her glass art interpretations of Shark Bay and the Ningaloo Coast World Heritage areas will be on display.
The acclaimed artist, who was also an Australian Tom Malone Glass Prize Finalist earlier this year, hopes her 2025 artwork, Phyto, will inspire further dialogue around conservation in the same way her 2024 exhibition SALTWATERS did.
“My transcultural creative practice centres on how artisanal crafts can blend with science and cultural understandings as a vehicle for advocating authentic care of our home habitats. It’s my desire through initiatives like SALTWATERS and now Phyto to influence a better care of place,” said Dowling Giudici.
“Through my creative work with kiln-formed glass, I consistently seek ways to increase the value of my contribution toward healing and regrowth and I believe when old wisdom and contemporary understandings are shared together, new and useful meanings can emerge and influence better decisions.”
In addition to her work as a glass artist, Sabrina founded Aartworks with her husband, Tony Dowling – an organisation that facilitates between artists and cultural networks, processes and institutions.
Sabrina has won numerous collaborative public art projects including the Radio Wave Bench Sculpture in Carnarvon, which was a finalist at the German Passagen Design Awards, and was also the recipient of the prestigious award for the Glass Artists of WA in 2022.
Sabrina Dowling Giudici will present Phyto at Palazzo Loredan as part of The Venice Glass Week from 13 – 21 September 2025. For more information, visit: www.theveniceglassweek.com for details.
Image: Phyto by Sabrina Dowling Giudici – photo by Anton Blume