Anna Orlina reflects on identity through glass

Ten years after she began creating glass art, Anna Orlina presents her debut solo exhibition, Reflections of Being, a luminous exploration of the medium rooted in her personal experiences.

Family, faith, femininity, lineage and selfhood are Anna’s abiding subjects. Her explorations take forms that are distinctly her own: playful and luminous, yet with a contemplative core. They draw on the experiences that have shaped her as a young woman, a daughter and an inheritor of the Orlina glass legacy.

Glass responds to light and shadow, texture and movement, lending the sculptures optical depth and inviting viewers to engage with their precise forms. Working with it also offers a tactile sense of play. Anna likens her process of cutting, grinding, polishing and laminating glass, as well as upcycling scraps into new works, to the hands-on spontaneity of assembling Lego pieces.

The exhibition reveals an artist continuing to develop her approach to glass sculpture. The pieces have an exploratory, lightly psychedelic quality, their structures revealing new aspects as viewers move around them. Anna searches for forms and figures that hover between the figurative and the abstract, giving shape to her artistic ambitions.

The “reflections” in the exhibition’s title refer to Anna’s journey toward this milestone in her artistic career. The word also evokes glass’s capacity to return our gaze, inviting us to look inward.

“I think the sculptures can become a kind of mirror — not necessarily because they tell the viewer my story,” Orlina says, “but because they give them an opportunity to think about their own.”

Reflections of Being is on view from 18 September to 11 October at Galerie Stephanie, on the sixth floor of the East Wing of Shangri-La Plaza in Mandaluyong City.