Ruth Allen
Ruth Allen is an acclaimed glass artist with a 35-year career spanning sculpture, design, and experimental practice. Her work explores elemental materials and phenomenological experience.
Rooted in material curiosity, environmental advocacy, and a commitment to cultural durability, her practice centres producing work that is both conceptually rigorous and deeply sensorial.
Alongside being shortlisted for major awards including the Tom Malone, INDE, Waterhouse, and the Clarence Prizes, Ruth also provides artist fabrication services and collaborates with industry leaders across art, design and architecture — integrating cutting-edge, contemporary craftsmanship across sectors.
Ruth is the Director of r.a.g.e, an independent hot glass studio in Coburg North, Victoria. Alongside her team of five, she is establishing The Glass Epicentre — Victoria’s first independent, purpose-built, community glassmaking facility. Committed to nurturing the next generation of glass artists and preserving this vital craft, r.a.g.e is paving the way forward by championing education, sustainability, innovation, and safeguarding the cultural legacy of glass art.
Tribal Roots, 2025. Hot formed glass, 100% waxed cotton, 800 L x 180 W x 10mm D, Photographed by Fred Kroh.
Ruth’s Interview
Tribal Roots explores the notion of origin, belonging, and the cultural threads that shape identity. Born in Aotearoa/New Zealand as a Pākehā, my childhood was deeply connected to Māori ways of life and the ocean that sustained us. Living predominantly aboard a boat, I grew up learning to carve bone, tie knots, and gather food from the sea—practices that shaped my early sense of making and connection to the world.
Throughout my jewellery practice I have returned to the amulet, an object worn close to the heart, traditionally a guardian against harmful spirits and an opening for benevolent ones. Given the chance to work with sheet glass, I was drawn to expand this intimate form into body adornment. Each hand-formed glass link becomes a bead, bound sequentially by plaited, knotted cord. The result is a supple, protective adornment that carries strength, rhythm, and movement.
While grounded in my New Zealand origins, the work also reflects my adult life in Australia, where community and creative kinship continue to guide me. Wherever we come from, we gather our tribe—those whose values and energy resonate with our own. Tribal Roots embodies this meeting of culture, memory, and material, shaping identity through the hand and mind in motion.
Rugged Terrain, 2025. Fused, wheel cut glass, charred hardwood, 570 H x 120 W x 6-60mm D, Photographed by Fred Kroh.
Rugged Terrain emerges from the tension between beauty and destruction, resilience and fragility. A charred hardwood base rises upward, following the line of a thin, angled plane of fused glass. From a distance, the glass burns with a striking, fiery red intensity, evoking land ignited. As you draw closer, intricate networks of circles, squares, and white crosses reveal themselves—patterns reminiscent of maps, territories, and the scars of upheaval.
In conceiving this work, I was thinking of land on a global scale—of borders and countries marked by the destructive forces of war, fire, flood, and cyclonic weather. Here in Australia, seasonal bushfires are a constant threat, a reminder of both the harshness of this land and the growing uncertainty of global warming. This duality frightens me: the land holds both sustenance and devastation, and our relationship to it is increasingly fraught.
The work is totemic—a vertical marker that stands as both a reminder and a reflection. It speaks to the endurance of land while acknowledging the scars of environmental and human destruction. The charred timber bears witness to fire, while the glass—fiery yet fragile—embodies both transformation and vulnerability.
