Open House Melbourne - Launch Event
Earlier in July, Pieces of Eight opened its doors as part of Open House Melbourne 2026 to launch a collaboration with Foolscap Studio and glass artist Hamish Donaldson — a collection called Cullet.
It felt right that the launch happened at Pieces of Eight Gallery in Russell Place. Foolscap shaped the architectural interior of the gallery itself, so having the studio's founder, Adèle Winteridge, back in the space for the unveiling of a new joint work closed a loop that had been years in the making. This one took her collaboration with the gallery in a new direction — from architecture into object.
The collection takes its name from the material at its centre. Cullet is the glassblower's offcut — the coloured trims, tails and broken ends that pile up through a working day, ordinarily swept into the bin. Hamish Donaldson, working from his hot shop on the Mornington Peninsula, gathered it instead. Fragments were sorted by colour, picked up onto molten clear glass, then encased and blown out, the inclusions drifting and settling as each form opened. Suspended in clear glass, the offcuts read as something closer to stained glass than salvage — fractured, luminous, caught mid-movement.
Nothing about that settling can be controlled, and that's the point. Every vessel resolved differently in the making, and by the nature of the process, every one is unrepeatable. There are eight in total, a number that won't be lost on anyone familiar with the gallery: vases and dishes, each catalogued individually, each carrying its own record of where a fragment landed and when the glass was allowed to move.
It's a fitting fit for Open House Melbourne's Generous City theme this year — a collaboration built on reuse, staged in a building shaped by one of the collaborators, made from material the industry had already written off. On the night, guests moved between the vessels and the gallery's usual collection, with Foolscap and Hamish's work sitting at the centre of the room.
The Cullet collection is now showing at Pieces of Eight, 28 Russell Place, and available to view online.
Photographs by Aaron Hargreaves
