Over Christmas our new house was looking like a total building site, but now in the new year I can see a few things which feel like green shoots emerging out of the rubble!
Read the previous post about the renovation
Read the next post about the renovation
Glass is a difficult medium in which to work. I am often left feeling envious after watching my neighbouring makers at trade shows who seem to set up their stands in about a quarter of the time I do and with a lot less hassle. Glass is heavy, bulky and fragile and frustratingly it requires pale surfaces and good light to make it looks its best, so displaying glass well often involved bringing one’s own plinths and lighting.
So I thought it would be interesting to learn a bit more about display and I attended a two day course at Craft Central with Diana Furlong who was as a Senior Window Dresser at Harrods for many years and has worked extensively as a lighting technician in West End theatre. She has a wealth of experience in devising and installing eye catching, effective displays.
Much as I would have liked to have to be able to style and accessorise my products in the same way that everyone else had, I realised that when it comes to my glass, keeping it simple is probably the way to go.
Read the previous post about the renovation
Read the next post about the renovation
In the last month before Christmas I had a little run on Global Treasury Lightboxes. In the last few weeks I’ve sent out eight lightboxes, some of which were made in bespoke colours and some were from my standard stock. It’s been such a rush I only managed to get a couple of quick snaps as the last two were being packaged up for dispatch.
As soon as we bought our new house, I felt the pressure was on not to waste a moment and get on with the business of finding a builder. I had seven different builders come over to give me a rough idea of costs for the extensive building works needed. Horrifyingly, the first builder quoted a cost so high we could have bought another house at that price! Interestingly, not one of the builders turned out to be English. I ended up going with my gut feeling and asked Jonathan – a Chinese builder who bizarrely had a hint of a Yorkshire accent – to start the first part of the job immediately.
I would have assumed that the demolition and stripping out of a house is possibly easier than rebuilding it, but when Jonathan brought only two men for the job – Ming and Lin – I had my doubts. Ming turned up with a trendy haircut and slim cut jeans and looked like he might have just graduated from a graphics or illustration course at Central Saint Martins. Lin, while slightly older and more robust, was nonetheless still disconcertingly small. How on earth would just the three of them manage to dismantle and rebuild a whole house?!
Eight skips were filled with detritus from the house and the space was cleared for the next stage after Christmas.
Read the first post about the renovation
Read the next post about the renovation
My whole life was packed into storage in November and it has remained there ever since, so the best I could hope for this December in terms of Christmas shows was going to be very low key. The Dish and Spoon, a cafe in Nunhead, offered a lovely opportunity to come together with some other local mums to put on a pop-up.
I spent a lovely morning hanging a colourful window display with Sarah Capel of Sarah Capel Printing and Peggy Mends of Peggy Bamford and an even more enjoyable Saturday selling to locals in the lovely warm atmosphere of the Dish and Spoon.
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 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!
It’s finally ours! My next challenge is to project manage the full renovation and refurbishment of this, our new house, and (eventually) to custom design and build a glass studio in place of the existing garage. We were specifically looking for a corner property to allow the studio to have its own entrance, and there weren’t that many in the areas we were looking, but we finally found this oddity in West Norwood.
I could kind of see why the builder from across the road said it was like a castle – it is a strange building with different roofs, windows in seemingly random places and parts that look like they’ve been added on as an afterthought. The last owners made it even uglier by adding a very badly constructed wraparound extension with cheap bricks and then bricking over the garden and adding high walls which led neighbours to describe it as ‘a prison yard’! As a final flourish, they built the new brick patio about eight inches too high which left the whole ground floor with a damp problem.
Inside is even stranger with a front-heavy layout, where the rooms at the front are enormous and the rooms at the back are small. This unbalanced layout has been made even worse by the people we bought it from who carved up the small rooms into even smaller rooms by adding small bathrooms everywhere so that they could have guests with their own ensuites.
All in all, quite a project and one which I have no idea when it will be finished.
Right…. to work!
The Contemporary Glass Society had a great turnout for its Creative Hub session last Saturday, and I suspect that – like me – many people came along because of the opportunity to visit the studio of Angela Thwaites that was promised as part of the day. Angela is a well known glass artist who casts beautiful intimate objects from glass and teaches glass internationally. I also knew Angela from a few years ago when at one of our Teepee Glass exhibitions we invited Angela to exhibit as our guest artist, so I was keen to see where she makes her work, and clearly I was not the only one. The assembled crowd was so large that a local church hall had to be sequestered to accommodate us all for the Creative Hub discussions in the afternoon.
It wasn’t until the evening that the group snaked its way through the streets of south London to Angela’s house and so it was that we were ushered in smaller groups of four through her now dark and freezing garden to squeeze into her compact studio.
Glass casting requires a lot of equipment so I had expected a large space but I was taken aback at how small her garden studio was, and yet how everything fit so carefully into the tiny space. Various kilns, cold working equipment and a large sink all fit into this three dimensional puzzle of a space with all the surrounding gaps filled with shelves of materials and samples of moulds and glass.
Having just packed up and left my own studio – and knowing I will be without a studio for months now – it seemed at once familiar and poignant to be reminded how we artists try to create beautiful and perfect objects from within a space that often feels like organised chaos.
However seeing Angela’s bike propped up against the machinery, and realising that she must have to move that bike into the garden every time she works, I also remembered the reason I am moving…. there came a point when my studio tipped from being organised chaos to simply being chaotic, and ultimately I am putting up with being studio-less for the next few months in order to build a better space for myself in the long term.
Goodness knows how long we will be here, as builders are often slower than they say they will be and there is the small issue of obtaining planning permission for various building works from Lambeth Council, which is not known for its competence or efficiency! So in the meantime I am making do with a small kiln and a cramped workspace in my parents’ garage.
