MUSINGS FROM A DARKENED CORNER

2026 // SOLO

PHOTO: DYLAN SMYTH

Musings from a Darkened Corner translates lived experiences with mental conditions into tangible physical objects, which can be perceived, assessed, and understood. Artist Dan De Nardis uses glass as the shears through which to cut back the curtain between the psychological world and the physical, as her personal investigations into the mind plunge deeper into introspection, and we, the audience, are invited to peer in.

Glass sculptures take on the form of colourful and fantastical monstrous figures, amalgamations of body parts, and corrupt renditions of human organs to graphically portray a series of honest vignettes from a life shadowed by persistent anxiety and recurring depressive episodes. The transformative nature of the medium and the intensive and often cyclical processes required to shape it are a mirror to the tumultuous patterns and exertions encountered on the path to psychological improvement. Here, intrusive thoughts become jabbering jaws on legs, paranoia stares back at you with far too many eyes, and snowballing catastrophic trails of thought hang perilously as knives above your head.

Inhuman symbology is wielded to portray qualities and experiences which are deeply human, as De Nardis endeavours to bring tangibility and grant faces and forms to the intangible, invisible monsters which plague us. Psychological distress becomes freed from the incorporeal trappings of the mind in the artist’s ongoing pursuit to encourage open, honest dialogue about mental illness and personal struggle, and better understand the workings of the human psyche.