Catching up…

Bonne Maman, engraved jam jar, tooth, pound coin. 2013

Apologies for not posting since September, but I have been head down in the studio working on a new body of work courtesy of winning the Adrian Henri Poetry in Art Prize. Apart from being a huge boost to morale, the award has enabled me to buy a new kiln, sand blaster and grinder and has given me 5 months in my studio.

Birth Of The Simple Light, painted fused glass 20 x 23 x 2.5cm

River Day, fused painted glass, 12 x 14 x 1.5

Strand, fused, painted glass, 12 x 14.4 x 1.5cm

Calm Light, Fused painted glass, 20 x 20 x 2cm

Apart from this I have been working on a window for Skokholm Island with Rachel Phillips. We will be installing the window at Easter in time for a grand opening of the Island Bird Observatory at the end of April. I would love to develop some of my Skokholm ideas more fully and am currently researching the feasibility of undertaking a more in-depth project on the island.

Skokholm window in progress.

I continue to develop my work with children and recently worked with pupils of Ysgol y Frenni in Crymych. I am committed to the value of drawing as a learning tool. The importance of offering creative observational experiences was brought home to me recently when a primary school teacher told me how she has noticed in the last five years that increasing numbers of children are coming into school unable to actually look at anything that is not moving on a screen in front of them.

Drawing the Preseli Hills with pupils from Ysgol y Frenni, Crymych.

This year the gallery will be open by arrangement to enable me to devote more time to developing new work. If you would like to visit please email me or phone to make an appointment.

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Turning Of The Year

The trees are totally magnificent at the moment! I love winter and am enjoying the crisp and the soggy days and soaking up inspiration for my work.

A very exciting development is that I am going once a week to the Department of Architectural Glass at Swansea Metropolitan University where I have a Visiting Artist arrangement whereby I exchange working with the students for access to the facilities and expertise in the department. I am working with the first years on their “Decorative Processes” module with the fabulous Lisa Birkl. It is wonderful to go there and for one day a week to concentrate solely on playing with ideas. It makes me realise how much of my time at home is taken up with admin, writing proposals, answering emails and generally making a living, and how rare it is to have uninterrupted creative time right now…I can feel a New Year’s resolution coming on! This term I have been playing around with the sandblaster, developing my skills and trying things out. I am definitely going to invest in a sandblaster soon.

Alongside this I have been developing my work in Welsh and English medium local schools and have made a total of 200 glass Xmas decorations with pupils aged 3 to 11 over the past month. It has been fantastic to work with the children and to spread the word about glass to a new generation! Their work is beautiful.

This has been quite a year for me from installing the Conwy Castle commission, winning the Warm Glass Prize, going to the Northlands symposium, collaborating with Sarah Harman on the Rosebush project, studying with Antoine Leperlier, and now working in Swansea – I am really beginning to feel things start to come together.

I am now putting the final touches to my New Year show ready for the opening on 27th December. For the first time I am showing a series of glass panel alongside my paintings. Pop in and join us for a glass of mulled wine from 27th december – 7th January.

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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

Glass and slate

Its June in the quarry, and the period of my Welsh Arts Council research grant is coming to an end. I have been burning the kiln at both ends to finish some cast glass pieces and consolidate my research, and put all the oral history tapes, sketches and photographs in some kind of order. Sarah Harman is working on a wonderful suite of songs using some of the threads and stories we have uncovered.

I am still unearthing (sometimes literally!) the secrets of this place, and am awash with ideas and sculptural possibilities. It is a kind of cultural archaeology, and I love that. This research is a real gathering, and is giving me the opportunity to explore lots of ideas and try things out.

I have also been to the studio of Darren Yeadon, a stone sculptor who lives in Goodwick. Darren has been pondering the possibility of putting some glass into his work,and has just completed a stone sculpture of a fragment window, so in some ways our work has been following similar paths. When I got in touch with him to ask if he could cut some slate for me, he was glad to oblige and we have agreed to do a skills exchange, and who knows, maybe we will even collaborate on making work some day.

I also heard this week that the Welsh Arts Council have awarded me a training bursary to cover my travel expenses to Northlands Glass Centre and to pay for me to attend the Glass Biennale in Stourbridge and a masterclass at the International Festival of Glass in the Midlands with pâte de verre master Antoine Leperlier. I am very grateful for all this support – it is going to be a very exciting and busy summer!

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!

Conwy progress

Painting is progressing well on the windows. We are working flat-out to meet our deadline for installation on March 8th. I am really enjoying experimenting with etching and sandblasting as well as painting pieces, the fragmentary nature of the piece gives lots of scope to be spontaneous within a structure.

 

 

 

All these pieces will be cut up and included as fragments. Meanwhile, the painting is fabulous to do, so different to my usual approach to using colour, thinking all the time about the light! I am learning a lot about traditional techniques from Rachel. Hardly any time to blog!!

 

Getting down to it…

The gallery has been converted back into a stained glass workshop and the wonderful Carwyn has constructed fantastic easel light boxes to enable us to work on all three panels together. We have been ailing with seasonal bugs but have been enjoying painting up some glass and preparing pieces for sand blasting. It is great to have the templates and cut lines up in the studio and to actually begin to assess light and colour.

I went to a fantastic gig at Cuffern Manor this week, Julie Murphy and Ceri Owen Jones performed new pieces from their upcoming album, ably supported by Fiddlebox. Julie’s songs are tender and poignant and their collaboration embodies the best of traditional and contemporary work, poetry and music, and, amazingly, Ceri played a piece from the medieval ap Huw manuscript – one of the manuscript sources I have been consulting for my windows project…synchronicity at its best!…dreaming of a harp in the chapel..!

Cutting the cloth…

Setting out some glass on the cartoons we can get an idea of the size of the work and the scale we need to work to. We want the windows to have an instant impact but also to reward concentrated looking. It is great to have it all mapped out and to have some defined boundaries to work within.

Rachel went up to Conwy last weekend with the valiant Carwyn, her husband and a carpenter, and Alun Adams from The Architectural Glass Company in Swansea. They made wooden templates that fit exactly into the 13th century glazing groove so that we can make our panels to fit exactly into the eroded stone openings.
 Now I have to leave all this and clear out our studio to hang my New Yearpainting show ready to open on 27th December.

Glass, Lobsters and a Peregrine

Sketch of Lybster harbour

I went to see the Touching the Past exhibition of glass at Northlands this morning.the exhibition features the work of 6 glass artists, Michael Bullen, Joanna Garrett, Denis Mann, Patricia Niemann, Karlyn Sutherland and Louise Tate.

I especially liked the work of Louise Tait, her work crosses over my areas of interest in memory,stories from the past and knitting.

Then I cycled down to the harbour where I spent the rest of the day painting and talking to the lobster fishermen.

I chanced upon the remains of a peregrine falcon on the beach! I have salvaged the head and feet and hope to do something with them on my masterclass. How fantastic to find such beautiful things here on the beach and then have a place I can take them to and work out what the hell to do with them! So, they are sketched, wrapped and currently stashed away in my friendly landlady’s freezer awaiting attention next week!

‘Community Spirit’ by Louise Tait

The Dagger Chandelier by Patricia Niemann

Sketch of Peregrine remains.

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Rachel Phillip’s glass studio.

Yesterday I went to see how Rachel was getting on with her latest commission, a window for a church just outside Swansea. Rachel is a stained glass artist who lives in my village and who teaches on the Architectural Glass course at Swansea University.

It is fascinating to see how she works and how she is always pushing her work ahead with explorations of technique and research into historical methods. At present she is copying a Burne Jones window from the V&A to learn more about the methods used to create it, whilst making some glass to repair an original William Morris window, this is alongside working on her commission.

We talked about how we might collaborate on some glass painting, bring together our skills and experiences…watch this space!