Inside Hamish Donaldson's Red Hill Studio

Nothing Wasted: The Making of the Cullet Vessels

At Hamish Donaldson's Red Hill studio, the furnace never really cools. Pieces of Eight visited the Mornington Peninsula hot shop to watch one of eight hand-blown vases take shape, each destined for the gallery's Open House Melbourne collaboration with Foolscap Studio.

The vessels begin with what most studios sweep away. Cullet is the glassblower's offcut: the coloured trims, tails and broken ends that accumulate through a working day, ordinarily bound for the bin. Donaldson has made it the subject rather than the residue. Fragments are gathered, sorted by colour and picked up onto molten clear glass, then encased and blown out, the inclusions stretching, drifting and settling as the form opens.

It is hot, physical, unhurried work. The gather comes out of the furnace glowing and moves constantly — turned, shaped, returned to the heat, turned again — because glass at this temperature will not hold still or forgive hesitation. Colour behaves unpredictably at that scale. A fragment that looked emerald in the hand can open into something paler and stranger once it has been stretched through a wall of clear glass.

Nothing about that settling can be controlled, and that is the point. Suspended in clear glass, the offcuts read as something closer to stained glass than salvage: fractured, luminous, caught mid-movement. Every vessel resolves differently. Each is entirely unique and, by the nature of the process, unrepeatable.

There are eight works in the collection, a number that will not be lost on anyone familiar with the gallery. Created for Open House Melbourne 2026 and its Generous City theme, they were unveiled at Russell Place on Friday 24 July, in a building Foolscap helped shape. It was a fitting convergence: a collaboration about reuse, presented in a space designed by the collaborator, and realised through materials the industry had already written off.

What the studio visit made clear is how much judgement sits behind work that looks effortless in the finished object; where a fragment lands, how long the gather sits, when to open the form and when to wait. The vases carry the record of those decisions, and of the ones the glass made on its own.

The Cullet vessels are now at Pieces of Eight, 28 Russell Place, until Saturday, August 8 and available online.

About the collaborators

Adèle Winteridge is the founder and Design Director of Foolscap Studio, a cross-disciplinary design practice known for forging meaningful spatial experiences — including the distinct architectural identity of Pieces of Eight's Melbourne gallery.

Hamish Donaldson is an acclaimed Australian glassblower renowned for his technical precision and expressive approach to hot glass, bringing years of refined craftsmanship and material curiosity to this joint venture.