Ten years ago a group of friends from Central Saint Martin’s glass course spent a week sleeping in a huge teepee in the garden of a lady in the Black Country. It was a cheap way of living for the week so that they could attend glass courses at the Glass Biennale held in and around nearby Stourbridge.

I was one of that group and along with my seven fellow glass artist friends we decided, a year or two later, to form a loose collective to exhibit and promote our glass work. Trying to think of a catchy name for our group, we remembered our time sleeping under canvas and the name Teepee Glass stuck. We constructed a glass eight-sided teepee, to which we each contributed one face, and this has been displayed at all the shows and exhibitions we have held since.

Our latest exhibition marks a decade since we formed Teepee Glass and so we thought it would be fitting to celebrate this milestone with an exhibition called ‘TP10YRS’ at the Stained Glass Museum in Ely Cathedral. Especially for this exhibition, each Teepee member has created a piece 10×10 inches square and based on the theme of “10” and these are for sale alongside many other pieces.

Five of our group of eight decided to go up to Ely for the private view. We got as far as the final stretch of the A10 between Cambridge and Ely and disaster struck: there was a flapping noise and an alarming clunking from the engine, and we pulled over on to a verge on the side of the road to discover that one of the spark plugs had flown off and there was no way the car was starting again. Four of our fivesome were AA members so we called for help, assuming we might still make it to Ely in time for a glass of bubbly and the speeches….

Five hours later we were still waiting! The recovery truck eventually came and transported us all the way back to London. Our day had turned into a ten hour round trip up and down the roadways of the UK…. miserable!