Bronte Cormican-Jones

About the work

The Way the Light Hits the Building considers glass as a material that shapes how space is seen, divided and understood. Moving between transparency and reflection, the work draws attention to the way glass can frame a view, separating one space from another while allowing vision to pass through.

The installation takes the form of an enclosed structure made from large sheets of glass, with apertures opening through each wall. These openings create shifting sightlines across and through the work, framing partial views of the surrounding architecture and of other bodies moving nearby. From different positions, the apertures align and overlap, creating layered views that continually recompose the space around the work.

Bodies, light and architecture are framed, distorted and layered across surfaces. Large surfaces hold and divide the surrounding environment, creating a structure that sits somewhere between sculpture and architecture. Light moves across the glass and catches its edges, while bodies and surrounding forms are layered through multiple planes. The work asks the viewer to negotiate both what lies beyond the glass and the material itself: its weight, surface, scale and capacity to establish boundaries. In this way, the work shifts between transparency and obstruction, interior and exterior, openness and enclosure.
Glass is so embedded within contemporary architecture that its presence can easily go unnoticed. The Way the Light Hits the Building brings attention back to this familiar material and to the quiet ways it organises perception, movement and spatial boundaries.

In this presentation, the work sits within the public and transitional space of an airport, where glass, reflection, thresholds and directed movement already play a significant role in shaping experience. Surrounded by people continually arriving, departing and passing through, the installation draws the architecture around it into the work, making the changing movement, light and activity of the space part of how it is seen.

About the artist

Bronte Cormican-Jones is an Australian artist and researcher based between Garrigal Country, Sydney and Utrecht, the Netherlands, with a site-responsive spatial practice across sculpture, performance and writing. Her work examines how bodies encounter, occupy and negotiate built environments, with particular attention to architecture, perception, labour and the politics of public space.

Cormican-Jones’ sculptural practice engages the body as both a material reference and a spatial measuring device, informing how she constructs, reads and reconfigures space through sculptural form. Her work is grounded in an expanded understanding of sculpture as a way of thinking through architecture, where material and spatial relationships are used to test how environments are built and inhabited. Working with architectural materials including glass, steel, timber and brick, she considers how scale, structure, weight and material presence condition our perception of space.. Glass is central to this enquiry for its ability to both define and destabilise space: framing a view while remaining transparent, reflecting the body while allowing sightlines to continue through it. Through shifts in reflection, transparency, light and orientation, her sculptures position perception as something active and bodily, asking how the material conditions of architecture shape what can be seen, occupied and experienced.

Cormican-Jones is currently undertaking a practice-led PhD at the University of Sydney, supported by the Fauvette Loureiro Memorial Postgraduate Travel Scholarship. She graduated from Sydney College of the Arts with First Class Honours in Visual Arts in 2022 and was awarded the FUSE Glass Prize David Henshall Emerging Artist Award the same year. Her practice has been supported through residencies at JamFactory, Eramboo Artist Environment and Canberra Glassworks, and her work has been presented across Australia and internationally, including at the Milan Glass Biennale, the National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra Contemporary and Canberra Glassworks.

Her broader practice seeks to create new ways of sensing, understanding and refitting the spaces we collectively inhabit through embodied, material and critically attentive forms of encounter.