Author: Alex R

Alex R
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A Decade Late!

I finally finished a lightbox that I made for a wedding present for a friend and sent it off yesterday. Nothing unusual about that, as I like to make special customised glass pieces for my friends, except for the fact that my friend is celebrating her 10 year wedding anniversary…. yes, that’s right, this piece is literally a decade late!

I am mortified to admit that I started this lightbox back in 2004 while I was still at college, but I didn’t finish it in time for the wedding and it has been languishing in a drawer in my studio ever since! It was about time that I finished it so it finally got photographed and wrapped up yesterday. Happy anniversary, guys!

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New skills

I am dedicating this summer to new beginnings… finally getting myself on social media (which I’ve been resolving to do for years, without ever having even dipped my toe in Facebook!) and making a new website including an online shop. This involves acquiring some serious new photographic skills and finally learning how to use the studio lights I bought years ago. So with this in mind, I signed myself up to a photographic course with Maythem Ridha, a documentary photographer and filmmaker in south west London.

It was a dazzlingly sunny day so coming into a cool dark photographic studio was rather nice, but those studio lights heated up quickly and we got down to some serious work getting our work looking good in the photos. My fellow students were mainly jewellery-makers who have the same issues as me when photographing work, namely those pesky reflections! We used diffuser tents to create a white space around the object in order to get rid of every possible reflection, but the black rim of the lens poking through the tent was still reflected in some of the larger silver pieces. After years of frustration photographing my glass, I was suddenly counting my blessings that I don’t have to deal with the mirror-like surface of jewellery.

I came away with a much better idea of how to use my equipment to make good photographs, thanks to Maythem and Paul. Looking forward to trying out my new skills…

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Samples Galore!

 

SamplesI have been busy making samples for a new commission which I am about to get started on. I just love making samples, and it’s a really important part of the creative process in working out the transition from a paper design or an idea in my head and into the full glassy reality! Sample making can be a bit like brainstorming in glass and sometimes I come up with inventive ways of doing things because the pressure is off and the name of the game is experimentation.

This also feeds into my teaching, both because I like to share my new techniques but sometimes the actual samples also make it into my teaching box.

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House of Glass VII

Last weekend I held the first part of my Open Studio. The weather wasn’t brilliant but the sparkling glass made up for the lack of sunshine. As usual, I opened up the studio and most of the house to visitors with all the seconds glass being sold off at bargain prices in the studio.

 

House of Glass part 2 will happen this weekend and I think it’s going to be a sunny one so we’ll be laying out lots of glass in the garden too. My top room will be dedicated to Love and Marriage, with lots of lovely paper flowers on display. Come along 11am-6pm.

As well as all the old favourites, I had some new glass on display. My new Mandala Panels (below) are delicious kaleidoscopic glass collages which create a complex double image in the reflective background which changes as you move through the room.

Mandala-Panels

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Central Saint Martins job

Zusana Gombosova's piece

I recently did a job for a Central Saint Martins student to custom make some glass for her MA project. Zuzana Gombosova has built a research device for growing objects from Bacterial Cellulose. This device could enable its user to grow and engineer properties of the material, eventually growing it into small complex objects. Her work is on show from 18-24 June at the new CSM building at 1 Granary Square, King’s Cross.

I made seven panes of glass with a smoky graduated tone for her structure. The graduation of tone was achieved with the very careful application of glass enamels by airbrush spraying. It was a frustrating process as the slightest droplet or scratch would show up on the layers of spray, so it was a matter of cleaning off and starting again (many times!) until I had eventually an absolutely perfect graduation. Then I had the seemingly simple job of matching the graduations between panels which, again, was not simple!

Zusana Gombosova's piece open

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Butterfly Mosaic Course

Butterfly-Mosaic

Last month I taught my Butterfly Mosaic course at West Dean for the first and possibly last time…. it wasn’t a very full course, but as a result I had a very calm and enjoyable four days, quite different from my usual running around trying to keep on top of eight students’ work! The students who had enrolled were very experienced, so it allowed me to spend some of my time working alongside them and we all produced some lovely butterfly-inspired glasswork.

Butterfly-Course

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Praise Be!

StNicholas Font

I got the tip off that my work had briefly featured in Songs of Praise. This episode, Phoenix from the Ashes, partly focused on St Nicholas Church in Radford Semele which was rebuilt after being almost razed to the ground in an arson attack. The programme makers interviewed Emma Blount who made the beautiful leaded glass windows, but there was some brief footage of the glass font bowl that I made.

The section of the programme about St Nicholas Church starts from 6:30 and my glass appears briefly at 8:12 and 8:45