Laurel Kohut

Laurel Kohut is a glass artist who creates sculptural work that explores ideas of sentimentality. Her works involve glass blowing, cutting and cold working. Kohut has become known for her large-scale jewellery sculpture series. In these works the artist plays with notions of scale, increasing the size of familiar items to the point where they are transformed beyond a functional form and can be appreciated with new meaning and symbolism.

As the artist describes: 'As an object maker I am fascinated by the way people form attachments to the things in their lives. I wish to investigate this and mainly my work has focused around the concept of jewellery as it is personal, precious and sentimental. I wanted to look at jewellery in a different way – scaling up the objects so that the viewer could at once recognise the form but also ponder the nature of preciousness and perhaps the meaning of their own keepsakes.'

Laurel discovered the art of glass blowing whilst studying for a Bachelor of Applied Arts at Monash University in Melbourne at the age of 17. She immediately fell in love with glassblowing not just for the beautiful objects that it can create but also for the technical skill it requires and the physical challenge it poses. She exhibits her work in galleries across Australasia.