Artists Gilbert Calleja, Jesmond Vassallo and Robert Zahra are collaborating in an exhibition of artworks that will be presented at the Upper Galleries at Spazju Kreattiv in Valletta. As the main event within a year-long project entitled Glasshouse, this exhibition is an important milestone in a three-way creative dialogue between these artists. Starting with an initial public encounter that took place last July at the gallery of the Malta Society of Arts, this joint effort is opening a window on the visual art techniques and processes that characterise their works. While working together and bringing their artistic exploration in dialogue with each other, each one of them adopts a very different approach towards the project's thematic exploration.

Glasshouse looks at the incubation affect one finds in glasshouses and treats this as an entry point into the simultaneous creative and corrosive dynamics generated by isolation and insulation. It provides an invitation to viewers to engage aesthetically with this theme by showing how the instruments of protection and care can morph into physical and intellectual straightjackets and vice-versa. The exhibition adopts a curatorial approach that shapes the access to the works themselves as a conversational form: the dialogue that the juxtaposition of artworks from different artists in the same space creates is a provocation for the viewer to engage and to be challenged, and an invitation to respond through emotional and intellectual reflection.

It is no wonder that in dealing with the concept of starting points (the project's July exhibition was entitled Seedlings), the artists converge on the theme of origin, in all its fraught cultural and political entanglements. Zahra's interventions in this exhibition work as orientation instruments within the ecological sphere that surrounds us - a kind of aesthetic geolocator - and uses plant-life as a metonym for our interdependent though now largely alienated cohabitation with other life forms. Vassallo looks at light itself as a problematic point of origin for the visual artwork. His works show how the mediation of visual stimuli through reflection and refraction complicates the concepts of a unique light source and of holistic perspectives - one must think here of sunlight in the way Plato equates it with ultimate truth. Calleja brings the conversation on source into its fleshy and organic immediacy and presents works that, in a paradoxical process of abstraction and circularity, straddle the ambivalence between our organic beginnings and advanced decomposition. The distinctive uniqueness of each artist's perspective in this exhibition is weaved into an open-ended aesthetic discourse. By engaging with these works, we may glimpse new ways of understanding the concept of origin; we may also realise, unwittingly, how often we forget - or avoid - to allow ourselves to be awed by its inexpressible remoteness.

The exhibition at Spazju Kreattiv is supported and funded by Arts Council Malta and will run until 25 February.