lindanorris

It has been such an amazing 10 days at the International Festival of Glass that don’t know where to begin…

Firstly, I had four days in Wolverhampton doing a masterclass with Antoine Leperlier. Antoine is a French artist whose use of glass casting techniques derives from working with his grandfather,François Décorchemont, who, in turn had learned from his father, Emile Décorchemont (b.1850), who was studio assistant for Gerome. This depth of heritage resonates through his work. Glass is his language, and he uses the peculiar properties of glass to explore his primary themes which are an exploration of the human condition in relation to the fourth dimension, time.

Obviously, in four days you can not hope to learn so much, but the experience of working with Antoine and absorbing his seriousness of purpose was incredible.

In the evenings we attended various exhibitions and openings connected with the International Festival of Glass. A visit to the Glass Afloat show at Bodenham Arboretum was particularly memorable. It was fascinating to see how other glass artists have made work for a site specific external location. In particular I was impressed by Jacque Pavlosky’s piece made from cut glass found work. Jacque was a fellow student on Antoine’s course.

Following on from this masterclass, I went to Stourbridge to attend the International Festival of Glass. This event centres around the British Glass Biennale which showcases work from among the best in British studio glass.

Gorgeous piece by Cathryn Shilling.

Piece by Louis Thompson which won the Best in Show Award.

James Lethbridge’s breathtaking ‘Midas Jar’.

‘Titan’ a beautiful piece by Bruno Romanelli

Based at the Ruskin Glass Centre, an arts facility housed in a transformed glass factory, there were an amazing series of lectures, demonstrations and exhibitions. In particular I enjoyed lectures by Antoine and by American artist, Dick Marquis and by Lani McGregor who who talked about the history and development of the Bullseye Glass Factory in Portland Oregan who sponsored my recent Warm Glass Prize. I also enjoyed meeting Jo Newman, who has a studio at the Ruskin Centre, and seeing her subtle beautiful work. I had booked on an architectural glass symposium which was cancelled, so I booked an introduction to glass blowing with Martin Andrews instead.

I love working with hot glass and Martin took me through the basics. I had prepared some moulds and inclusions to work with so we ended up working late one night with Martin and his noble assistant, John, blowing pieces for me in exchange for my help manning the shop during the day! It was great to get to know Martin, and to have an insight into how to improve my mould making techniques for working with hot glass, hopefully this is the start of future collaborations!

I also had some ideas I wanted to try out about drawing with hot glass on paper, and I met KT Yun at the festival who has developed the Minimelt, a portable furnace. KT was happy to allow me to experiment with glass and paper and to begin to explore some new possibilities.

 

There were a number of evening events as part of the festival. The most spectacular was Torcher Tailor, orchestrated by Carrie Fertig, a glass friend from Edinburgh, and consisted of a glass wedding dress being fabricated on stage using torches and flameworked glass. The dress was made onto Jessica Mann, a young sculptor wearing a spun glass wig. At the end the audience was invited to come and put a rose or a thistle into one of the small glass vases which made up the skirt of the dress.

One of the most interesting and unexpected things for me to come out of being at the festival was to begin to get a feel for the origins of British Glass making as an industrial process in the Midlands 300 years ago. I went along to an opening at Dial Glass Works, home of Plowden and Thompson glass makers and discovered a factory built in 1788 and remaining very much unchanged since.

Before I left Stourbridge, I went back to Dial Glass Works and photographed and drew people working in the factory. It was incredible to be in this historic building which is still very much a functioning factory and to watch highly skilled craftsmen pulling 30 foot long perfectly straight and true glass rods for use in industry.

All in all I have had a great time and am very grateful to the Arts Council of Wales for sponsoring my attendance at the festival in the form of a training bursary.

Now I am back in Pembrokeshire and settling in to my studio and enjoying the autumnal shift in weather. I am looking forward to processing the incredible summer of glass I have had.

 

Heading west to the Midlands

I took a few days off last week to camp with my family down at Caerfai Bay near St. Davids. It is an idyllic spot (apart from when gales rip through the campsite!) and it was lovely to be with my in-laws and nephews and niece and go to sleep under the stars and wake to red dawns.

Rachel and I have been working on some new ideas for a commission we are hoping to get. It is wonderful how we seem to synchronise our ideas and often arrive at similar solutions for things. Again, it is a treat to work with her.

On Thursday I took Rachel on a mystery tour to the studio of Sara Lloyd Morris in Martletwy. Sara and I have been working together for a while to design some pieces of jewellery made from fragments from the Conwy windows. I wanted us both to have something special to wear for the official opening, which is now taking place on 13th September. Rachel was delighted! Sara has made a fab job of realising our ideas and I look forward to wearing my pieces on the day. Infact I shall be showing them off at the Glasshionista event which is the finale to the Glass Biennale.

I am writing this on the train to Wolverhampton where I am going to attend a pâte de verre course with French artist, Antoine Leperlier, followed by a long weekend at the British Glass Biennale in Stourbridge. I can’t wait! Leperlier learned casting from his grandfather, François Décorchemont, a legendary pâte de verre artist, so even though there isn’t much time, I will at least soak up the experience and wait to see how it will manifest itself in my work.

As the course is only three and a half days I have spent the past week making waxes and moulds so that I will have something to get started with. I am also booked in to half a days glass blowing with Martin Andrews again I have spent some time preparing so as to make the most of the time. I have made some refractory moulds to blow into and some glass pieces to use as inclusions in the blowing process. This is only my second experience of glass blowing, so, I am, as ever, ambitious!!

As well as seeing some fabulous glass, I am looking forward to seeing some old and new friends this week, including Bill Swann, from North Wales. Bill and I initiated a glass/paint collaboration many years before I ever dared to touch glass myself, Christine Lababidi who was a fellow student at Liquid Glass on my first glass course, and the inimitable Carrie Fertig who will be performing her Torcher Tailor extravaganza (which involves flamworking a glass wedding dress directly onto a living bride!) live on Saturday night.

Thanks to the Arts Council of Wales for making this trip possible for me as part of a training bursary.

 

Taking glass into the landscape.

“Red on Green” an installation by Anya Gallacio

I am just back from a fabulous fortnight with glass artists at Northlands Glass Centre in Caithness, eight hours north of Edinburgh by train. On the way north I stayed in Fife with my sister and we went to Jupiter Artland, a summer sculpture exhibition in parklands on the edge of Edinburgh. It was fabulous to see sculptures in the landscape, I especially liked the Andy Goldsworthys and Cornelia Parker.

Dinner at Jeff’s. Photo by Tina Norris

The night before I went up to Caithness we met up with Michael Rogers who taught me on my masterclass at Northlands last year and went for dinner with Jeff Zimmer, his partner, Mark, and dynamic glass artist Carrie Fertig. It was great to catch up with everybody, Jeff and Mark were perfect hosts and excellent cooks, and their flat became a tardis and expanded to accommodate us all! Thanks to Tina for the photo.

Exploring glass in the landscape in Caithness.

My time in Caithness was my prize in the Warm Glass Competition. It was an amazing experience to be part of a group of artists from around the world and to have time and space to reflect on my work. I ended up collaborating in surprising ways with Emma Wooffenden, a contemporary artist based in London who works in glass. Our collaboration started out with me helping her to document some work she was doing based on ideas relating to the figure in landscape, and ended up as more like a shared performance piece on a beach 365 steps down from the cliff top at Whalligoe.

Having time away from my usual practice has allowed me to think about how my painting relates to my glass work and how I could combine the two in the future. Maybe two dimensions isn’t all bad after all!

A cast Bullseye glass, knitted copper wire and Lybster pebble piece I made at Northlands.

It was an intense period of work and a brilliant opportunity to share ideas and get feedback on my work from an immensely talented and experienced group of artists. The symposium was organised and facilitated by Jane Bruce, an internationally well known glass artist who lives in Manhattan. The food, as ever, was fabulous and we were well looked after. The weather was less than endearing, but, then I am used to a bit of rain!

Now that I am back home I have been photographing some of the sculptures I have been working on for my (Arts Council of Wales funded) Rosebush project. It is really exciting to put the work in the landscape and see my ideas coming together. I am looking forward to having some time in my studio!

 

Heading North

Having finally got some of my slate pieces out to the quarry and with the kiln cooling with the latest Rosebush piece inside, I am headed north to Lybster in Caithness to have 9 days to play with glass as my prize in the Warm Glass competition. I am having a few nights in Edinburgh staying with my sister enroute, and hooking up with some glassy friends on Monday, before embarking on the 8 hour journey to Caithness by train. I will be away from home for two weeks. That piece will be well annealed by mid July!

I am looking forward to having time, facilities, materials and space at Northlands to experiment with ideas and make work inspired by the landscape, alongside an exciting bunch of  glass artists from as far afield as Sydney and Portland. Scarey and exciting to be part of this. I can’t believe I have come so far (and ended up in the same place!) in less than a year. Last year I remember a sinking feeling after the Northlands conference of “what the hell am I doing?” when I listened to a tired and disillusioned glass artist sharing her perspective on life as an artist working with glass. Actually, I cried, to be so far out of my comfort zone, to be taking such risks as a painter entering a new field, an artist meeting craft. And what a journey it is ! I am constantly surprised by how long everything takes, Rachel smiles wryly and says “welcome”! The medium imposes this discipline on my unruly ideas, which is just as well.

It is an exciting path. I am so grateful to my new  glass artist friends who are making me so welcome, to Bullseye Glass for sponsoring the prize, and to The Arts Council of Wales for supporting my travel to Northlands, and to Jeremy Lepisto, Michael Rogers and others who have shared their skills and knowledge and continue to make supportive “Likes” from afar. Thanks to everyone else in my life who puts up with my absences, my enthusiasm and nerdy fascination with coefficients and historic documents…

Northlands here I come!

 

From Rosebush to Newgale (via Clunderwen).

Work is coming along on my ‘Can yr Oerwynt’ project (funded by the Arts Council of Wales) based on the history of Rosebush, my neighbouring village. I am working on ceramic decals and experimenting with firing imagery onto old plates in preparation for an installation I am planning as part of the project.

I had a fantastic visit to Martin Bellwood‘s foundry in Clunderwen to discuss getting Martin to make a “plinth” for my glass work for the Rosebush project. It was brilliant to begin to put glass together with metal and other materials in his workshop and to see the possibilities for combining media and collaborating with another artist. I am so lucky to have Martin just around the corner – people travel a long way to work with him. He certainly knows his materials and our discussion opened up all kinds of possibilities which I hadn’t really considered. I am thinking of using industrial iron as the basis of the plinth, to reflect the industrial nature of much of the history of the Rosebush Quarry and railway.

This weekend I am teaching a painting course near Fishguard at Indigo Brown. I hire Indigo Brown a couple of times a year as a base for my courses, Maggie and Andrew are the perfect hosts, they seem to think of everything, and we are very well fed by Andrew, who is great cook. I am running an autumn course here (October 4th – 7th) and there are still some places left if anyone is interested!

Lunch at Indigo Brown.

The students are all getting stuck in and are engaging with the theme of breaking out of their habitual ways of painting and seeing. Newgale beach was wonderful this morning at low tide with lots of interesting detail, shifting light and miles of wet sand to keep us happy. We are working in the studio with wax and sand and other textural materials and concentrating on mark making and exploring new ways of working.

Jane sketching at Newgale…where did she get that bag?!

Judith on Newgale.

Judith breaking out!

Sam pondering in the studio.

 

Settling back into Pembrokeshire

I have been busy all week with the interpretation for the Conwy Castle windows, so yesterday I took a break and we went over to Skomer to enjoy the bluebells at their best. We had the afternoon on the island before Den’s guided boat trip in the evening, so we got to see all the old favourites and reconnect with the place.

The short eared owls were flying in North Valley, the guillemots and razorbills were doing their thing on the cliff edges and the puffins were starting to bring sand eels in to feed the first chicks. At the latest count there are something like 11,400 puffins nesting on the island! So, it is a busy place, but if you time it right you can get around without bumping into too many people, and the bluebells, which are very late this year, are in full bloom and creating spectacular carpets all over the island.

The weather was fantastic and the evening boat trip was wonderful, we saw a few porpoise, gannets, puffins and other auks. The views of the island were breathtaking and the reflected colours in the water were amazing.

The trip was capped off by being surrounded by a raft of shearwaters as they swooped and glided over the water at sunset.

This morning I went on a (Welsh language) guided walk across the Preseli’s to remember those who protected this landscape from being requisitioned by the M.O.D. during the Second World War. The guide was Geraint Harries, a local National Park Warden who explained  about the wildlife of the place and Hefin Wyn, a local author and historian who has written extensively about the history of the area and was able to tell us more about the history of the landscape.

Unfortunately I couldn’t do the whole walk, but cut back through Rosebush with Sarah Harman so that we could discuss our on-going project research into the human shaping of the landscape around the quarry. I am looking forward to spending more time in the studio in June finishing some pieces that are in progress on this, and Sarah is well underway with writing a suite of songs. It is good to catch up and fill each other in on our progress. This is part of a research and development project I am undertaking with the support of The Arts Council of Wales.

 

Getting down to other projects…

The past few weeks since installing the Conwy windows I have been settling down to new projects and picking up the Rosebush Quarry work.

I am beginning a collaboration with a glass blower in Japan, Kaori Maeda. Kaori and I met in 2008 when she was working at glass studios in the UK and have kept in touch ever since. I have made small pieces of decorated glass which I have mailed to her to use in her blown forms, and she has sent me some blown forms which I have begun experimenting with. We are in the process of applying for funding to work together in Japan and UK, but for now this is one way of actually getting started and trying out our ideas. It is far from ideal to be posting glass across continents and Skypeing across time zones, but at least it is a beginning for us.

“Can yr Oerwynt”, work in progress.

I have also been getting down to some serious research on my “Can yr Oerwynt” project for which I have a Research and Development Grant from the Arts Council of Wales. Because the Conwy project has taken almost all my time since September, I have had an extension on my deadline for this work to the end of June. Together with singer/songwriter, Sarah Harman, I have been interviewing older local residents who remember the North Pembrokeshire  Railway coming to these parts and who have family stories going back centuries. Gathering photographs and documentation from the County Archives as well as recording personal histories, I have begun work on making a series of small glass pieces as maquettes for larger work which I would like to do in the future.

It is good to get engaged with the glass and to begin to get some of these ideas down in the studio.

In preparation for these and other projects I have been experimenting with sandblasting and enamelling glass bottles and am really enjoying finding out what I can do with these techniques, recycling freely available glass at the same time. Do get in touch if you have any interesting or coloured glass bottles you do not need!

 

Calligraphy on Glass

This week we had a visit from Kathryn Campbell, an artist based in Carmarthenshire who trained as a calligrapher. We have been searching for a calligrapher who can work with us to incorporate the beautiful couplets written by Damian Walford Davies in the windows. Kathryn is an artist I have known about for a while but had no idea she was a talented calligrapher, and, what’s more she is excited about our work and able to fit in to our tight deadline! Incorporating the poems in the windows needs careful thought and we have gone through a number of options and approaches, finally we decided we need to commission a calligrapher in order to do the work, and the poems, justice.

The painting is coming along well, we need to get all the glass painted and delivered to Swansea in a fortnight’s time for leading in order to comply with our installation date of March 8th.

I took a day in the week to work with Sarah Harman on our Rosebush Quarry project “Canu’r Oer Wynt”. This is a project I began in the autumn supported by a research and development grant from Arts Council Wales. I have been researching in archives, interviewing local people and experimenting with some glass ideas in my kiln, but since November the project has taken a back seat because of the Conwy commission. Sarah is a singer/songwriter and talented choir leader who is planning to write a suit of songs based on the history of the quarry, together we interviewed local people who remember the railway in Rosebush when it was operational, Peter Claughton, an industrial archaeologist and Geraint Harries, a friend and local man who works for The Pembrokeshire National Park Authority. We recorded the interviews to form the basis of our research for our project and discussed our ideas and plans. It was good to get back into this project.

Recording an interview with Peter Claughton in Rosebush Quarry.

 

So near and yet so far…

Crash cooling the kiln.

I was supposed to go to Skokholm Island today for 4 nights painting, but nature intervened in the form of high winds, so the boat didn`t run. I ended up setting the kiln and taking off for St. Davids with my friend and Skokholm companion, Rachel. I wanted to show her some amazing glass pieces in Oriel y Parc. These delicate and intricate pieces were made in the second half of the nineteenth century in Germany by Leopola Blaschka (1822-1895) and his son Rudolf ( 1857-1929) and are intended to illustrate underwater life-forms. They look like contemporary glass pieces (Rachel said they could be miniature Cihuly‘s) yet also have an archival quality. Very interesting and lovely to see in the context of my current interest in historical material, landscape and glass.

I also love the fantastic Peter Lanyon painting on show there and this brilliant hounds sculpture by Catrin Howells which is based on the story of Cantre Gwaelod.

We called in to visit Steve Robinson in his glass studio near Solva and Adam Buick near St. Davids. Adam is preparing for a kiln opening event on 29th July, and has lots of new work ready to load into his kiln. He has also recently been awarded a research and development grant from the Arts Council of Wales, and has been busy experimenting with various new glazes made with seaweed. I love visiting Adams studio, his work is beautiful –  forms, texture and the very smell of land and sea.

On the way home we stopped off at the church at Little Newcastle to see the stained glass windows there.

Window made by Roy Lewis in 1962

 

Caroline Lovelys’s Resurrection window at Little Newcastle Church, 1995

So, a lovely day out, and now home to crash cool the kiln and wait for a call from Jerry, the Skokholm Warden, to let us know whether we will be able to get there tomorrow. Either way, I am itching to get some painting done.