Sabrina Dowling Giudici never imagined her journey would take her from the remote Australian town of Carnarvon to the prestigious glass galleries of Venice, Italy. The Italian-Australian glass artist has overcome family doubts and career detours to establish herself as a distinctive voice in the international art world, specializing in cold glass techniques that capture the unique light of her Australian hometown.
As a teenager passionate about art, Dowling Giudici faced strong opposition from her Italian father, who warned her against pursuing art as a career. "He explained it was because Michelangelo died with ticks on his body," she recalled. "So he said, 'it's all well and good to make beautiful art but you need to be able to make a living as well.'" Following her father's practical advice, she dutifully enrolled at the University of Western Australia to study accounting, though the experience was torturous. "I thought my soul was going to be ripped out of my body," she said.
After completing her accounting degree, Dowling Giudici returned to Carnarvon, where she grew up, to work in regional development. However, her true calling eventually drew her back to the arts. She developed expertise in cold glass techniques, a specialized process where she drapes panes of solid glass over molds and shapes before placing them in a kiln to create organic, flowing forms. "I'm a bit of a specialist with fire blankets, so I get very organic shapes as a result of that," she explained. "I will hand shape a fire blanket and then I'll put my very flat piece of glass over that and it will soften down and take the shape that I have underneath it."
Her choice of glass as a medium stems directly from her upbringing in the Gascoyne region. Carnarvon's extraordinary natural light became the defining inspiration for her artistic practice. "Carnarvon is one of the world's highest light-intensity places on the planet," she noted. This exceptional clarity wasn't lost on NASA, which operated a tracking station in Carnarvon from 1963 to 1975, supporting the Gemini, Apollo, and Skylab space programs, including the historic 1969 moon landing. At the time, it was the largest tracking station outside mainland USA and featured the most accurate radar system in the Southern Hemisphere, proving vital for maintaining communication with Neil Armstrong and his crew.
Growing up during this space age era profoundly influenced Dowling Giudici's perspective. "I was in Carnarvon during all the moon landings. When I was a child, I thought everybody worked in the space industry because we had the NASA tracking station there," she remembered. "We have those projects there because we have very few cloudy days." The same crystal-clear skies that made Carnarvon perfect for space communications now inspire her glass artworks, which capture and refract light in ways that speak to her hometown's unique luminosity.
The pivotal moment that transformed Dowling Giudici from regional development worker to professional artist came five years ago, following the death of Uncle Jimmy Poland, a respected Malgana elder from Shark Bay whom she had worked with closely. "I'm here today, I believe, because of him," she said. "Because I had the privilege of working with him for a few years." On the day of his funeral, while watching the sunset over Shark Bay on Malgana country, she experienced a moment of profound realization. "The sky became moody. It was out of the blue and we got the most amazing white rainbow. And it hit me all of a sudden that he actually had been teaching me for the last few years and I hadn't realized, it's that really beautiful, profound elder style way of teaching. And so I thought that's it, I'm going to do it myself."
Her artistic success has brought her full circle to her Italian roots. Born in Rome to Italian parents – her mother a seamstress and her father a civil engineer – Dowling Giudici's early life bridged two vastly different worlds. Her father's brothers had migrated from Italy to Carnarvon to establish a construction business, and when she was a toddler, her parents decided to join them. The cultural contrast was stark and memorable. "When we arrived in Carnarvon, [my mother] was fully resplendent in her Roman fashion gear," she recalled. "I had shiny patent black shoes with lace white socks and my father was in his beautiful long elegant pants and shirt and we arrived in the middle of this very, very Aussie outback town."
Those early experiences shaped both her aesthetic sensibilities and her resourcefulness as an artist. "As a child I never had toys. I played with what was available. So there was bits of wood and my mother she sewed all day and all night, and so I would have pieces of lace. For me they were the toys." This childhood connection to lace would later become a defining characteristic of her glass work, creating pieces that blur the boundaries between different artistic traditions.
For the second time, Dowling Giudici has been invited to exhibit at Venice Glass Week, one of the world's most prestigious glass art events. Venice, renowned as one of the greatest glass-making centers globally, has embraced her distinctive approach. "Venetians love their glass, and they know their glass," she explained. "When I arrived there, I arrived with a very different style of glass. They were very curious. My glass has been described as quite lacy. It's Murano meets Burano. Murano is where glass is made, and Burano is where lace is made."
Her Venice exhibitions have inspired her to work on an increasingly ambitious scale. One of her recent pieces, "Acqua Alta," directly responds to her Venice experience. "I've got a fun piece and it's called Acqua Alta, which means high tide," she said. "In Venice, at certain times of the year, you've got to put your wellies on because [the water] comes up to your kneecaps. It's really a weird way of living. Even the shop doors have barricades." The piece measures 1.3 meters in length and incorporates crushed Italian mineral water bottles, creating art from recycled materials. "It's actually displayed at about knee level, just for fun," she added, maintaining the playful reference to Venice's seasonal flooding.
Downing Giudici's work represents a unique fusion of influences: the intense light of the Australian Gascoyne, the delicate craftsmanship traditions of her Italian heritage, and the profound lessons learned from Indigenous elders about connection to country. Her pieces, including works like "Sea Nymph" from her Onda Series and "Coral Spawning," demonstrate her ability to capture organic, flowing forms that seem to embody both the movement of water and the play of light. As she continues to develop her large-scale works and gain international recognition, her art serves as a bridge between continents, cultures, and artistic traditions, proving that sometimes the most unexpected journeys lead to the most authentic artistic expressions.
