Author: Alex R

Alex R

Competitive Spirit

Image: londonconferencevenues.org.uk

I took the train up to London Bridge on a lovely sunny Monday morning this week to do my judging duties for the Stevens Competition. Glaziers Hall was unavailable so we had a lovely room in Southwark Cathedral Conference Centre with lots of windows to view the sample glass panels. Ironically the site where the finalist’s panels are to be installed is in a corridor with substantially less light, so this was a critical consideration from the beginning.

However as a first time judge, I had a lot of other criteria to get my head round before anything else. The four judges were given a short introduction and then we worked in half hour segments, viewing and marking 6 panels at a time. There were six criteria to assess each panel against, but before I got down to the sticky business of handing out marks or reading artists’ statements, I wanted to give each panel at least a few minutes of my undivided attention. It doesn’t seem so long ago that I was entering the Stevens Competition as a student, and I remember how much thought and effort and work went into my entries, so I really wanted to just appreciate the glass pieces on display and connect on a sensory level with the artist’s intention.

Little did I know how much time would elapse while I was being all touchy-feely and when we were given our ten minute notice, I was in a slight panic noticing that the other judges had already allotted their marks and I hadn’t even started! Needless to say I managed my time a little better with each subsequent group of entries, so by the end I had the timing down to a tee.

We judges struggled with the decision beyond the first round of judging. We were to choose a prize for craftmanship and for presentation and the debate that ensued assured me that the Glaziers Guild, who run the competition, had chosen the group of judges well – we all brought different skills and areas of interest to the table, and we had a lively discussion for both categories.

After lunch, we proceeded to the second stage of judging which had a selection of the twelve strongest panels, again shown in two groups of six. This time we discussed each panel before remarking against the same criteria, and although I am pretty sure that my marking was consistent and a second viewing merely strengthened my convictions about most of the panels, we were told that overall our second round marks showed quite some variation to the first round marking…. the group discussions had obviously engendered a lot of thought.

What was interesting was how some panels which had seemed very strong contenders to start with, did not hold the emotional connection upon further scrutiny, whereas other panels which seemed obvious on first viewing, somehow acquired more depth the longer we considered them. Inevitably at this stage we were beginning to think about the panels in situ in a long, busy corridor and these aspects started to come into play in our decision-making. The final decision was deliberated upon for quite some time, going back and forth between pairs of panels, comparing them against each other to see how they fared when either viewed up close or at a distance.

The final marks were totted up and announced to us and, despite the worry that sometimes intricate marking systems can skew the results and favour submissions that don’t inspire that gut-feeling ‘rightness’, we were all satisfied that the marking had produced the right overall decision. It was a learning curve for me for my own practice to realise that the order of importance in submitting a competition proposal is to communicate:

1. simply
2. efficiently
3. professionally
4. emotionally
5. deeply

These are the chronological stages one goes through as a judge from first viewing to decision-making, though interestingly this does not match the chronology of viewing an artwork as a spectator, for which an emotional link with the artwork is of primary importance. However, as judges, we had to consider that the final panel chosen will be made and installed in an actual site (Swansea School of Glass), and thus it was critical that we had confidence in the winner’s professionalism as well as integrity of their work.

This was one thing on which I felt many of the entries fell down. I am a terrible perfectionist so I was aware that I was applying my own high standards and expectations to a group of student work, but I left feeling rather peeved that the easiest part (by a long way) of assembling a complete competition submission – such as checking for spelling mistakes or mounting a printed piece of paper on backing card rather than shoving in a dog-eared printout – were not done. I know one is meant to look past these things, but it immediately undermines one’s confidence that the entrant will have attention to detail in the final installation if the most basic of tweaks are not made in the submission in the first place.

However this aspect will provoke a lot of discussion at the prizegiving in May when the prizewinning students are announced. It will serve well as an educational experience for those that didn’t quite make the grade this time to improve for the next time they enter a competition such as this.

Happy Easter!

Easter Eggs

Happy Easter everyone! One of my resolutions this year was to try and get back to enjoying making instead of it becoming another thing on the to-do list…. finding my creativity again and rediscovering my childhood joy in the act of making.

I am the daughter of a German mother and I am the mother of a Russian Orthodox son, so I connect with Easter as a time of making, even more than Christmas. I loved the Germanic tradition of painting eggs which I remember doing as a child with my mum and my aunt. The Russian Orthodox tradition of staining eggs with a red dye was something from my son’s childhood and I have always had a bit of an obsession for Russian Orthodox iconography. So I thought I’d make my own version of Fabergé’s bejewelled eggs to celebrate Easter.

Musical Accompaniment

I’ve just come back from West Dean College where I was teaching a three day course on Layering Imagery. My classes always take place in the same space, the Stone Room, which leads off from the main workshop. As a result of walking through this workshop every day to get to and from class we are always very aware of what is going on in there, and so I was intrigued to see the technicians opening up the bank of dividing doors in the workshop to set up a double size space with workbenches and equipment.

What course could require thirty workbenches and such an enormous space?!

Later that day I saw five tutors, huddled up in the middle of the vast room having a very involved conversation. Then, through the closed door, we started hearing sounds…. long drawn out tones which at first sounded like furniture being pulled across the floor, and then clean tones singing out and squeaky little burps of sound in the background. Every so often we’d hear a strumming and a little tune would emerge from the cacophony of other, more familiar, workshop sounds.

Workshop

All became clear when we emerged for supper some hours later. The workshop had come to life with the largest course I have ever seen at West Dean – five tutors teaching thirty two students to make all sorts of musical instruments!

We saw half made cellos reclining on the benches while being administered to by their makers. We saw violins being formed around tight curves with a corona of clamps pinning them in. We saw the constituent faces of a guitar hanging on a washing line as though having been put out to dry. We saw intricate internal parts to some unfinished and unidentifiable instrument.


I found out later this was an annual 9 day course at the college which had been going for years. Students loyally returned year after year to work on their handmade instruments – one student had been coming for the last 27 years! In some cases people who started out as students eventually came back as tutors to continue their collective marathon of instrument making.

Drawn to Drawing and Ditchling

I met up this evening with the aptly named Sussex Sketchers, a drawing group brought together loosely from a pool of talented creative women. Unfortunately being in London, I am perhaps the one who has to travel furthest to meet the others in Sussex or Surrey, but it has proved worth the journey every time. So when it was suggested that our latest meeting should be at an evening lecture in Ditchling Museum of Arts and Crafts in East Sussex I didn’t hesitate!

I had not been to Ditchling before and, arriving at sunset, I drove around a little to find the museum. As I walked across the green to meet my fellow sketchers for supper at the White Horse, I saw the beautifully lettered sign for the museum and took a photograph. This was a little clue as to the history of Ditchling. The title on the sign was picked out carefully in Gill Sans, the typeface designed by the sculptor and Arts and Crafts figure Eric Gill who lived in the village for almost two decades and set up an Arts and Crafts community there which remained long after he left in 1924.

John Vernon Lord in his studio Image: theargus.co.uk

The lecture was given by Ditchling resident John Vernon Lord, whose name rang a bell but I couldn’t quite place until I saw his fabulous drawings. He has illustrated many children’s classics as well as writing and illustrating his own books, including The Giant Jam Sandwich. I have been thinking a lot recently storybook imagery from my childhood, and these pictures felt familiar and nostalgic and, published in 1970 as they were, I wondered if I might have seen this story at school.

Image: johnvernonlord.blogspot.co.uk
Image: johnvernonlord.blogspot.co.uk
Image: artinditchling.wordpress.com

As he spoke on, showing some of the thousands of drawings he has made over his 40 year career, the penny dropped… he illustrated The Nonsense Verse of Edward Lear (above left) which we had at home when I was a kid. I knew I had seen his drawings before!  He described in detail how many of his illustrations incorporated houses and roads from Ditchling, as well as being full of hidden references and personal mementos. One of his pictures displayed two perfectly rendered keys which he had drawn from his real life house and studio keys. When he locked himself out one day he managed to get a keysmith to make workable duplicates from the details in the drawing!

Image: johnvernonlord.blogspot.co.uk

Time was beginning to run short so he sped through what I thought were the most beautiful images of all – the sketches he had made in his little notebook. Wonderful, carefully draughted sketches covered every double page spread accompanied by notes and dates.

Image: johnvernonlord.blogspot.co.uk

One could tell this was a man obsessed by drawing… there was even a drawing of his end of his bed, made from bed while ill with flu. The questions at the end of the talk uncovered the fact that he has never spent more than four or five days in a row not drawing and that his illustrations are incredibly labour intensive, taking up to 50 hours each which he times with a stopwatch that gets paused for every coffee break or telephone call. Somewhat dolefully, he described his need to draw as a disease.

The combined temptation of a gorgeous book in the museum shop and the added bonus of an autograph opportunity had me purchasing a copy of “Drawn to Drawing”, which charts Lord’s drawing work over the past 40 years. I marvelled that even his writing demonstrated an illustrator’s deft touch, unlike my illegible scrawl, and I promised myself I would get back to drawing in earnest, inspired by one of the best.

The Artist as Collector

It was such a relief to finally get my website up online after so long working on it. I realised I haven’t had a day off this year so when my other half said he had Monday off this week, I thought I would take the extravagance of an afternoon off and go with him to an exhibition.

Butterfly Unfinished

I didn’t manage to finish the butterfly bowl that I had started that morning, so it got left in pieces on my lightbox and, pretty much as we hopped on the bus, we blindly chose to see the Barbican’s latest show Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector. As we stood in the entrance foyer of the gallery being divested of our bags, coats and mobiles (strictly no photography permitted) I peered in and spotted Damien Hirst’s Last Kingdom across the vast gallery space.

Damien Hirst 'Last Kingdom'

Image: creativereview.co.uk

Mesmerised by the hypnotic coloured lines of almost artificial-looking insects, my husband practically tripped over the velvet rope and toppled dangerously close to the glass vitrine. Meanwhile my heart was beating a little faster for other reasons; there, amongst the entomological concatenation, was a perfect column of pristine Green Swallowtails – the exact same butterfly I had been working on that morning. Damn that Damien! I do so want to hate Damien Hirst’s work for its shameless commercialism, but I am nevertheless seduced every time by his sumptuous decorative sensibility.

Image: creativereview.co.uk
Image: voltcafe.com

Anyway the display of Hirst’s work alongside some of his personal collection of taxidermy and historical anatomical models was the perfect demonstration of how an artist’s collection can influence and inform his work and it set the tone for this exhibition. The two expansive spaces of the Barbican Gallery had been divided into sections for each of the fourteen artists selected for their collecting proclivities.

Image: creativereview.co.uk
Photo credit: Rainer Bolliger

As we moved from space to space this multitude of objects, all artfully arranged with the heavy hand of the curator evident, started to coalesce in my mind into two categories – objects that spoke to me and objects that didn’t. I had some insight into this while looking at Hanne Darboven’s eclectic collection of items. Divorced from their natural habitat in her Hamburg studio where one might have had some sense of how the objects related to the space and the light there, they seemed to sit uneasily on a demarcated patch on the vast floor of the gallery. A German conceptual artist, Darboven had many objects which just screamed junk shop at me, but there were one or two which immediately struck a chord with me and seemed to be plucked directly from my own childhood holidays spent with the German side of my family.

Photo credit: Peter MacDiarmid

As we walked through the room dedicated to the record collection of the Mexican artist and tattooist Dr Lakra, we giggled at some of the outrageous album covers which flaunted the misogyny of 1970s rock with its naked ladies. I reflected that this room would have appealed to our Designed | Crafted artist Catriona Faulkner who is inspired by Mexican influences and tattoos and also describes herself as a collector. My co-curator and fellow glass artist Brett Manley is also an avid collector – her home is bursting with objects she has amassed over the years, and even her car dashboard is covered with a display of dozens of little ceramic figurines.

Photo credit: Peter MacDiarmid

As we ascended to the upper level, we came upon a room of hundreds of similar ceramic figurines, collected by artist Martin Wong and his mother in her garage and then brought together as an art piece after his death by an admirer and fellow artist Danh Vo. The sheer scope and magnitude of the collection belied the apparently trivial nature of its individual pieces which were the kind of mass produced kitsch I remember from my childhood – Disney characters, ceramic hamburgers, waving Oriental cats. What was it about collecting so much cheap souvenir-shop stock that brought the artist and his mother such enjoyment? All I could think was how much dusting would be involved! For me, the value in these kind of nostalgic objects which take me back to my childhood would be lost if I was surrounded by them everyday.

Photo credit: Iain Skelton
Photo credit: Justin Piperger

I was thinking about our connections to objects so naturally Edmund de Waal was very much in my mind and then, there we were in a section devoted to him and his collections – found objects he had collected as a child, inherited objects he had researched as a young adult and of course objects made by his own hand as a mature artist. I read De Waal’s wonderful book The Hare with the Amber Eyes several years ago which charted his family history back through different centuries and different countries by way of following the trail of inheritance of a collection of Japanese netsuke from generation to generation. On display were some of these netsuke, small sculpted objects which served both functional and aesthetic purposes as part of the traditional Japanese kimono. It was amazing to see some of these objects which he had so beautifully described in his book and I felt a connection to them, imbued simply because of my knowledge of what these meant to him and his family.

I found the show unexpectedly thought provoking, and whilst we had wandered in not knowing what to expect, on my way out I asked for the show programme to have something to read on the train home and as a reminder of the exhibition. I was told there was none and that all the information about the show was on an app that one could download. How ironic, that after this carefully curated exploration of the importance of collecting objects, the closest one could get to a keepsake of the show was an audio trace somewhere in the digital ether!

Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector is on at the Barbican Art Gallery until 25th of May

Swansea Sojourn

I was delighted to have been asked to be a judge for the Stevens Competition this year and so I had a much needed day away from the studio yesterday with an invitation to make my way to the University of Wales. The commission attached to this year’s competition is to be offered at the newly renovated School of Glass in Swansea.

Swansea-University

Having read about the building on the train journey from Paddington,  I was looking forward to see how the architects had integrated a modern glass extension onto the original building which was contructed in 1887. I had been told the campus was five or ten minutes from the station, and so taking directions from customer services in the station and following the map on my phone I was slightly bemused when, twenty minutes later, I found myself still walking up an interminable hill looking for the open campus I had imagined from looking at the architect’s image (above).

When my mobile told me I was at my destination, I knew I had been misdirected. It was the wrong building! It turned out that the School of Glass was at the bottom of the hill right in the middle of the town centre – I had been directed to the School of Art surrounded by space at the top of the hill. Don’t you just love those architects’ drawings which blank out the hustle bustle of the surroundings?! I must have walked right past it staring at my mobile!

Anyway I finally joined the other judges on the tour around the building led by Dr Vanessa Cutler who runs the degree and PHD courses in glass at the University. Our group was later described as “kids in a candy store” looking at the facilities, and it’s not surprising – I was wildly envious going from room to well-equipped room full of what looked like brand new equipment! It was like being taken into a stained glass treasury when we descended into the basement store, packed to the gills with racks of sample glass panels from previous Stevens Competitions. We joked that somewhere within the warren of rooms would be hidden an original Johannes Schreiter panel, but in fact we only had to look up to see a Schreiter panel installed in the staircase to the Glass department, a legacy of the time in the 1970’s -90’s that German Masters came and worked with the students in the School.

Reading Room

Image: www.southwales-eveningpost.co.uk

The last room we visited in the beautiful grade II listed building was a stunning circular reading room, once the Swansea Central Library, temporarily used as a Doctor Who set and, after the building was acquired by the University, briefly used as a leading room for the Stained Glass courses. The architects had applied a light touch when renovating this splendid Victorian interior, though they had managed to shift the entire entrance porch a metre forward into the space to allow for disabled access.

After a jolly lunch in the Dragon Hotel down the road, we disbanded again embarking on our various train and car journeys back to our respective homes around the country, and agreeing to meet again in Southwark Cathedral in April for the judging of the compettion.

Alex

Image: www.b4ed.com

On the train on the way back, I looked at further online images of the lovely building and realised with some irony that there had been a big clue calling out to me to announce the location of Alexandra Road campus…. I managed to walk straight past an enormous sign with letters four feet high saying “Alex”.

Doh!

New Website!

New Website

I am thrilled to announce the launch of my new website! It has been such a long time coming, and has involved various false starts all due to my terrible perfectionism! But it is here and I’m sure you will agree it is a vast improvement on my old website, which I designed 10 years ago and was beginning to look very creaky.

For a start, the new website is an e-commerce site, which means you can buy my products directly through the site. If you are a trade buyer, you will be happy to know that there is a whole secret trade shop which you will be able to access with a trade password which you will be given on stockist approval. Trade buyers will be able to buy directly and instantly from the website but if you prefer to remain on a 30 day invoice you will still be able to order over the phone or by email as before. I can still accept payment via most credit and debit cards.

Payments

Secondly you will see that there are lots of lovely new photographs showing my products in every available colour and design. I have finally got to grips with my camera and lighting equipment that I’ve owned for many years but never quite understood how to use! All the photos have been taken by me, except for the pictures of myself and my studio which were taken by my talented photographer friend Carine Lucchese.

Thirdly, you will see that are lots of extra pages which I hope will give you a glimpse behind the scenes and give you a sense of what I like. I will be making moodboards every so often and putting them up on the website. Once upon a time – when I had a lot more time on my hands than I do now – I used to love making collages to bring together my favourite images, and I still have old sketchbooks full of them. My website moodboards will be a digital version of these, gathering together memories, dreams and inspirations. As time goes on, I’ll start to archive these on my Pinterest pages.

Moodboards from years ago

I have thoroughly enjoyed the process of redesigning the website, mainly because of the pleasure it has been to work with my friend and colleague Iain Gutteridge of IG Design who has been absolutely brilliant in translating all my ideas into code. I have no doubt that Iain will never have worked with such a hands-on client as me (also read “control freak”!) I have literally gone through the whole design, creating mock-ups of every page with colour references for what probably feels to Iain like every last pixel!

From our humble beginnings discussing a rough version of the website in a Wimbledon cafe last summer, Iain has managed to fulfill my constant stream of requests and withstand the endless tweaks I’ve asked for. He’s come up with clever solutions to problems and has achieved a perfect result whether you are looking at my website on a mobile, a tablet or a computer monitor (but please do look at the website on a bigger screen – at least the first time you check it out – as that is the format I designed it for).  He’s done this all with extensive expertise, impeccable efficiency and, most of all, good grace. If you are after a good website designer, I can’t recommend him highly enough… Get in touch with him!

The Key to Creativity

 

When I got married eighteen months ago, I made a rather complex Save the Date. It was a little box that opened up to reveal a pop up date under which was a secret compartment containing a little key. The tag on the key gave a password to a website which guests could then access to read the full details of the wedding. It was time consuming, to say the least, to make 100 of these little boxes. One could say it was a labour of love, and I had a lot of time to think about my motivation for doing something so incredibly elaborate, even given it was for something as one-off and special as my wedding.

I realised that part of what motivates all my creative work harks back to the books I used to read as a child. A theme that seemed to run through all my favourite books was a sense of there being another magical world, a secret kingdom, or a deeper unseen layer underneath what the eye ordinarily sees.

The Magic Key

I used to pore over books like The Magic Key written by Mary Francis, with its beautiful vintage 1950s illustrations of Tommy and his sister MaryLou in the fairy kingdom which they access by way of a rusty key they found in their garden.

I think back to books like The Kingdom Under the Sea, with its captivating silhouette imagery done like paper cutouts against colourful ink blot backgrounds, or Edmund Dulac’s illustrations of the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales in which I remember only the mesmeric imagery like a series of dreams, feasting my eyes on the lavish attention to detail in the pictures.


I would get lost for hours in the illustrations of 1970s classics such as Masquerade, where the real world was pictured with an almost unbelievable degree of detail and there was a secret hare to find on every page and a cumulative trail of clues that could be solved to find a real life hare wrought in gold and jewels that was buried somewhere in England.

I realise that with all my work I am trying to recreate this sense of wonder, the sense of getting lost in the lavish surface detail of something but seeing through to something beyond, some other internal truth. There is a lot more to write about this, which I shall perhaps expound in future blogposts, but for now I will say that this is perhaps what explains my fascination with glass as a medium. As I wrote in my artist’s statement when I graduated Central Saint Martins, “Glass is about both surface and depth: one looks at it and through it, which renders it simultaneously there and not there.”

Here I am almost a decade later, still making glass and although my artistic output has become more product-based and streamlined to the commercial market, I still think of the pieces I make as little treasures that I am sending out into the world…. if you don’t believe me, look at the names of my products (“Global Treasury” and “Bejewelled”) or read about why I fell in love with glass here!

Alex-R-GlassKeys

So it seems very fitting that on the cusp of my tenth year, my first new product is a glass key. Harking back to my wedding fripperies and my childhood fantasies, I hope my glass keys will help me unlock a little bit more of the mystery of why I feel compelled to keep making, what it is that drives me to create, despite sometimes being faced with a lack of understanding or interest from those around me, or the financial strain that often comes of trying to make a living from working with glass. These are questions I know that all of us artists and craftsmen ask ourselves on a daily basis, and it is perhaps only in carrying on that we will discover the answers to those questions.

Aside

Blind Faith

I had booked into a seminar held by The Design Trust at the British Library yesterday morning and so I tubed it up to Euston. Making my way through the station, I saw a blind woman heading straight towards a wall which, thankfully, her white stick stopped her crashing into. I went over to offer my help and she said she had got confused and lost her bearings. I guided her back towards the escalator and once we were ascending she thanked me and said she was ok from there.

However that little encounter stayed in my head, particularly as she was the second blind person I’ve helped in a busy tube station in the last fortnight. The London tube network is confusing enough for a sighted person, but trying to navigate the swirling crowds and warren-like tunnels and escalators without sight must be nerve-wracking.

I arrived at the British Library ready to learn…. the seminar was on PR for small businesses, something at which I have proved to be consistently poor! Talks were given by Barbara Chandler (the Design writer for the Evening Standard), Lara Watson (the editor of Mollie Makes magazine), and Paula Gardner of DoYourOwnPr.

The Design Trust speakers

As the experts spoke, I rather resignedly realised there really is no getting away from social media. Forget formal press releases; these days it’s all about Twitter, Linked In, blogging, pinning and posting on Instagram.

Well… great.

I feel like I’ve spent years avoiding all of that social media stuff for a good reason, namely the huge black hole of time you fall into when you start doing it. I finally relented last year and reluctantly became a fully paid up member of the social media generation, and since then I feel like all I’ve done is (virtually) talk rather than (actually) doing. I just want to be making, but instead I have been led down what feels like a relentless labyrinth of online chatter, where somehow you have to make your voice heard… a vast, unending tangle of online imagery which you need to engage with in the most shallow and fleeting manner.

I want to be in the world of objects, where touch and feel invokes memory, not a flickering instant in the stream of images that we imbibe on a daily basis through social media.

I want to be in a world where, if three experts are talking, the audience in the room are respectfully paying attention to what they say rather than snapping images of them to tweet to their thousands of followers.

From Twitter @Sunnyholt

The irony was not lost on me that during one of the exercises we were set to write a press launch in 140 characters to tweet, my neighbour showed me her twitter feed where a photo had just appeared of herself looking at her twitter which had just been taken and tweeted by Barbara Chandler whom she follows!

Was I the only person in the room who found the glorious self-reflexivity of the situation totally ludicrous?!

And suddenly it struck me. I am like that blind woman in the tube…. clumsily trying to orient myself in a swirling, ever-changing torrent of information, looking for the way up and out, but heading the wrong way towards a dead end, and everyone else can see my fate but me!

As the seminar came to an end and my moment of metaphorical clarity was complete, I bumped into Sarah Young, one of the artists we invited to our Designed Crafted Christmas show. She was a welcome voice of assent and we had a little rant about the awfulness of social media, but I reflected that she and her partner Jon – with whom she runs Made London and Made Brighton – have managed to successfully navigate the labyrinth of social media (4000 twitter followers and counting!) without losing their integrity or sense of direction.

 

It had been a thought-provoking three hours, and as I emerged from the building and through the beautifully lettered portico of the British Library entrance, I was gobsmacked to see the blind lady from earlier, walking confidently along the congested Euston Road and back towards the tube.

Aside

Technology troubles

I’ve just got back from three days’ teaching down at West Dean College following the most frustrating week where one bit of equipment after another broke down in my studio. On Monday it culminated in my big kiln short circuiting every time I switched it on, and a stressful day clambering over and squeezing down behind it trying to establish which part of the electrics had burnt out. By the time I had ordered a replacement part to be sent, it was too late to actually install it and I had to leave for West Dean.

I was teaching screenprinting and sandblasting, both of which are techniques that enable photographic imagery to be applied to the glass. We had all new silkscreens and a kaleidoscope of coloured enamels ready to use, but the first day of the course felt much like my previous week and we sputtered to a stop as my brand new printer refused to print the student artwork we needed to make the screen proofs. After struggling with the technology for a couple of hours I finally gave up. But upon admitting defeat two of the West Dean technicians appeared, like knights in shining armour, rolling into the workshop the most enormous colour laser printer I’ve ever seen! Like a dream, the acetates were printed in minutes and we were in business.

Returning back to my studio this morning and the prospect of fixing my broken kiln, it’s making me realise how lovely it would be to have some West Dean technicians on hand permanently!