SALA Festival Announces its Featured Artist for 2018

RenowNed Glass artist Clare Belfrage has been namEd Sala Festival Featured Artist for 2018 at the festival's official opening night gala at the Art Gallery of South Australia tonight (Friday, July 28).

A multi-award winning artist with a career spanning three decades, Belfrage has forged an international reputation for her finely detailed glass sculptures that marry organic blown forms with intricate line work.

A founding member of iconic Stepney glass studio Blue Pony, former creative director of Canberra Glassworks and former lecturer at the University of South Australia, Belfrage is one of Australia's foremost glass artists with works in a number of major public collections throughout the world including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Corning Museum of Glass, USA, Niijima Glass Museum, Japan and the Museo do Vidro, Marinha Grande, Portugal.

As the festival's featured artist Belfrage's work will be on the cover of the 2018 South Australian Living Artists (SALA) Festival program and poster, and she will be commemorated in the official 2018 South Australian Living Artists Publication, funded by Arts South Australia, to be published by Wakefield Press and penned by local writers and artists Kay Lawrence and Sera Waters.

"To be the next SALA featured artist and subject of the 2018 monograph is a real honour and wonderful recognition of my career and contribution as a South Australian artist," Ms Belfrage said.

"SALA is an exceptional visual arts festival with a great legacy; it is broad and inclusive and it continues to grow each year. Creating my exhibition and the monograph for next year's SALA festival are both very exciting projects, and I look forward to contributing to the next great visual arts festival."

Belfrage's work is on show during the 2017 SALA Festival in "A Natural Way" at The David Roche Foundation House Museum in North Adelaide until September 2.

Belfrage follows in the footsteps of this year's SALA featured artist Chris Orchard, whose 2017 South Australian Living Artists Publication Christopher Orchard: The Uncertainty of the Poet was officially launched at Friday night's gala.

Written by a collective of six influential arts voices including celebrated poet and writer Peter Goldsworthy AM, artist and thinker Margot Osborne, Adelaide Central School Of Art founder Rod Taylor, visual artists Julia Robinson and Roy Ananda and Stephen Rosenberg, Director of Rosenberg Fine Art in New York, the book chronicles Orchard's more than 40 year career as one of South Australia's leading artists.

Orchard's work is currently on show in six separate SALA exhibitions including "Avatar" at the Art Gallery of South Australia and solo retrospective "Christopher Orchard: Then and Now" at BMGArt Gallery in Marleston. On August 5 he will lead a drawing tour of the Art Gallery of South Australia's Elder Wing, with tickets available via salafestival.com.

Now in its 20th year, the SALA Festival runs until August 31, presenting the works of more than 6200 artists in 660 free exhibitions across Adelaide and regions.

Encompassing all forms of visual art from painting, sculpture and jewellery to video and multimedia and much more, SALA will get South Australia's Art Started as more than 560 venues from pubs and cafes to wineries, cinemas and even tattoo shops are turned into pop-up galleries for 31 days.

More information about all SALA exhibitions and events can be found online at salafestival.com or by calling 8233 0676. All SALA events are free unless otherwise noted.

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