Musings

Studio Thoughts Part II

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. 

Bike

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.

Studio Thoughts: Part I


Hello Herne Hill! I haven’t lived here since I left home twenty five years ago, save for a few months when we temporarily moved back to my parent’s home whilst buying my house. And now it is ten years later and I’ve just sold that house, so we are bookending the decade with another stint at my parents until the new house is ready to move into. Phew!

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.


I’ve gone from a lovely warm organised studio (left) to a freezing cold mess in my parents’ garage (right), but I keep telling myself it will all be worth it in the end.

A Brief Visit to Southampton

I was delighted to have been asked back as one of four judges for next year’s Stevens Competition for Architectural Glass. The new brief for the competition has just been announced and it is a very exciting commission. St Mary’s Church in Southampton is commissioning a glass artist to design a stained glass window to commemorate the crew of the Titanic. Southampton sustained the greatest loss of life as virtually the entire crew of 1500 was drawn from the city. St Mary’s, its mother church, is closely connected with the ship which sailed from Dock Gate 4 close by and it was chosen as the venue for Southampton’s first memorial service after the disaster.

In early November I jumped on the train to meet the other judges at Southampton. We were driven from the station past the stadium of Southampton football club which has the nickname ‘the Saints’ as it originated from the church choir team. Pulling up in front of the church, we could see the neo-gothic architecture of the Victorian exterior which survived the blitz. 

The building was gutted except for the baptistery, belfry and vestry and all the windows other than those in the baptistry were destroyed. The present church was reconstructed in the 1950s with a spartan neo-Cistercian interior and attractive stained glass windows which were modern interpretation of what had gone before.

I particularly liked the window in the Seamen’s Chapel with its references to ships sailing beneath a rainbow and the drapery of a cloak emblazoned with stars like the unfurling firmament. Walking further round to look at the only original windows, I noticed the ceiling of the baptistery was also painted with gold stars on blue. My natural inclination – despite my role as a judge not an entrant – was to start coming up with ideas for the new window (old habits die hard!) and I immediately saw the potential link to an idea posited in the brief that 550 stars could be included in the design for the new window to represent the number of crew who died in the disaster. 

The new window panel will be built into the north aisle and the brief requires the design to incorporate a quotation from the Old Testament book Song of Songs – ‘Many Waters Cannot Quench Love’ – as well as the emblem of the White Star Line, the company which owned the ship. The site and the brief offer a rich source of ideas for what should be a very exciting commission.  

Read the competition brief here

Goodbye Home

Without even so much as a chance to unload my car after my October shows, I was back at home packing up my house and studio. We had spent the last month living among towers of boxes but I had ten days to fully pack up and move out. Then the day arrived when Pickfords turned up with a huge pantechnicon lorry, ready to take all the boxes away. Rarely do I consider new orders coming in to the Glass Studio as an unwelcome irritation, but unfortunately the post show orders were flowing in by telephone and email while I was trying to pack up the studio. I had the extraordinary situation of printing out my last batch of dispatch labels for the courier and turning my back for a moment only to discover that my printer, my computer and the desk that they had been standing on had been spirited away by the removal men!

The final thing into the lorry was the heaviest and the most difficult to transport – my large kiln – which was forced grudgingly up the ramp with the last of the muscle power. After two days of high pressure, and a scramble of Pickfords men scurrying up and down the stairs, I found myself in an empty house. Nothing was left and the home in which I’ve spent the last decade felt strangely smaller. Before dropping the keys off with my estate agent at midday, I had twenty minutes of solitude, walking from room to room, and allowing ten years of memories to come flooding back.

A forgotten memory returned of the first time I came into the house in 2005. I had been looking for a house on the market with a space that could be used as a studio as I was just on the verge of graduating from college and starting full time as a glass artist, but none quite fitted the bill. However as I walked in through the front door of of 47 Pymers Mead – literally as I crossed the threshold into the garage space which was to become the studio – my mobile phone rang, and it was a call from the Worshipful Company of Glaziers telling me I had won the Stevens Competition. Knowing that the prize money would allow me to buy enough equipment to set up a studio, I took this as a sign that this was the house for me.

Walking around the empty space I reflected on how much this house has been about work. My work has been woven in and out of my family life until it is impossible to separate the two. And strangest was seeing the studio walls, which were formerly groaning under the weight of shelves covering every spare inch of space. The industry of this studio had literally imprinted itself on the bare walls in the grubby silhouettes of shelves, folders, jars and tools, like the dusty ghosts of a decade of toil.

The White Road

The-White-Road

As a birthday treat for myself I got tickets for a talk by Edmund de Waal on his new book about porcelain, entitled ‘The White Road’. He was talking at my son’s school, so I dragged my son along for a rare injection of culture in his teenage world. He was superbly disinterested at the prospect of going, but perked up slightly when he realised that de Waal was the dad of one of his fellow pupils.

I didn’t know quite what to expect. I had enjoyed ‘The Hare with Amber Eyes’, de Waal’s first book which traced the history of a cabinet of Japanese ‘netsuke’ back through its ownership by various members of his family. However, where that book was cleverly woven through with an intriguing family history and insights into de Waal’s own obsession with collecting, I worried that a history of porcelain might be a bit heavy going and niche for a disinterested teenager!

 

However de Waal spoke engagingly, and his obvious enthusiasm for his subject infected the audience, who were entrusted to pass around a few pieces of 12th century porcelain that he had picked up at Kao-ling (after which Kaolin clay is named) in China without pocketing them (de Waal said he trusted an audience from Dulwich!)

He started the slideshow with a photograph of his studio wall, upon which he had written a list of locations around the world where he thought his journey might take him in researching the origins of porcelain. A flurry of images over the next hour traced that pilgrimage from the Jiangxi province in China, to Versailles, to Dresden, to Cornwall, to the South Appalachians, where he took his own teenage son to see the diminished kaolin deposits in the Cherokee National Forest, and to the porcelain works at Dachau.

It was a breathless journey that took in various curious stories of eccentrics, innovators, craftsmen and collectors, and we all just about stayed on board for the ride. There was a book-signing at the end, but when I saw the enormous size of the tome on sale to those who hadn’t already obtained a copy, I reconsidered the purchase. In that critical moment, I’m afraid I reverted to my own form of teenagerism, and thought: enough porcelain for one evening!

 

Ai WeiWei

For the whole of September I was intending to go to the Joseph Cornell exhibition at the Royal Academy, but I always underestimate just how all-consuming putting on our own show is every time we do it. And so it was that it came to the penultimate day of the Royal Academy exhibition and it was my only day off, and I only had an hour before closing time to get round.


What I should have done was to spend the entire hour focussing on the wonderful Cornell shadowboxes, which I have always been rather in love with but which I have never seen in real life in any great number. However queueing in the Royal Academy courtyard I was rather enthralled by the newly erected ‘Tree’ installation by Ai WeiWei, whose exhibition had just opened. With eight trees constructed from the parts of dead trees using hidden joints and industrial bolts, the installation made for an arresting sight against the eighteenth century building. So stupidly I bought a joint ticket which gave me only half an hour in each exhibition.

I zipped round the Cornell exhibition, trying to cut through the crowds who had obviously left it till the last minute like me. Perhaps it was the pressure of the crowds, but somehow the readymade assemblages didn’t speak to me in quite the way I expected them to.


On the contrary, moving round the monumental pieces in the Ai WeiWei show downstairs was not only easier but somehow more engaging. It was helped by the audioguide which, for the first time at the Royal Academy, was given freely as a result of being sponsored by Ai WeiWei himself who is keen to have his audience understand the context of his work. Much of his work is filtered through the political lens of being a Chinese dissident, and the central work of the exhibition, ‘Straight’, is both an homage to his fellow countrymen who died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and a criticism of corrupt Chinese officials who compromised on building safety standards to line their own pockets. The huge work unfurls across the floor, 150 tonnes of steel rebar taken from the mangled wreckage of schools destroyed in the disaster, carefully straightened and laid in undulating layers, flanked by wall panels listing the names of all 5,196 children who died.


A number of pieces were concerned with the adaptation, conflation and fetishism of China’s cultural artefacts, which act as a commentary on the iconoclasm of the Cultural Revolution. Furniture from the Qing Dynasty has been bastardised, with unexpected folds and corners expertly incorporated into the antique pieces by skilled cabinet makers. Tables to appear to climb the walls, stools look like they are cloning themselves in an ever-growing cluster, and enormous wooden columns from antiquity pierce and embed themselves into delicate tables. From a maker’s point of view, these pieces are both a wonder of craftsmanship and yet sit unsettlingly with the notion of the preciousness of the craftsman’s hand. This uncomfortable paradox of adapting centuries-old craft pieces was most apparent in one of the later rooms which displayed a collection of Han Dynasty urns dipped by the artist into emulsion paint in lurid colours. I thought they were rather beautiful and would have happily held their own in any contemporary craft show, but they have courted controversy since he started adapting them in the 1990s.


Unusually, we were also allowed to take pictures, though I didn’t realise this until half way around when my window of opportunity was shortened even more by bumping into friends in the main room. The piece in the final room had everyone reaching for their mobile phones to take pictures of the stunning forms of ‘Bicycle Chandelier’, a site specific sculpture consisting of hundreds of everyday bicycle wheels acting as the structure for cascades of white crystals to create a breathtaking chandelier.

The exhibition continues until December and it will definitely be worth a second visit.

Cranes for Peace

Image credit: www.togatus.com.au

The 6th of August marked the 70th year since the nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima which resulted in 40,000 deaths. One of the victims was Sadako Sasaki who was 2 years old when the bomb fell and though she survived the attack, she succumbed to leukemia at the age of 12 as a result of exposure to radiation. During her hospitalisation, she remembered the Japanese myth that upon folding a thousand origami cranes one is granted a wish and in her struggle to stay alive she started folding cranes from medicine wrappers and anything she could find, with some being so small she had to fold them with a needle. She passed away in 1955 and three years later a monument was built in Hiroshima’s Peace Park to remember all the children that died as a result of the bomb. At the top of the monument is a statue of a young girl with a crane and around it are glass cases which display thousands of paper cranes made and donated by people from around the world praying for peace.

It is two years since I got married and as we had initially intended to honeymoon in Japan, I asked my wedding guests to indulge in the Japanese tradition of making paper cranes to bring good luck and prosperity to the marriage. My mother took this to heart and made 1000 paper cranes pretty much singlehandedly! So our wedding venue was festooned with these lovely paper creations, which were all taken down carefully and have been stored since then. I wanted to do something special with them so the 70th anniversary seemed the perfect opportunity to put them to good use. So at the end of July all but a handful of my favourite wedding cranes were flown out with other English donations to Hiroshima and hand delivered to the Peace Park.

Creative Town, Proud City

Returning home from our Cornish week away, I was intrigued to find out more about the apartment building we had stayed in, the Barnaloft/Piazza apartments on Porthmeor Beach in St. Ives. The building was designed in the early 1960s by Henry C. Gilbert, better known as Gillie and integral to the artistic life of St Ives for the half century that he lived and worked in the town as an architect and an art gallerist. Bernard Leach said about him: “We owe Mr Gilbert a great deal for what he has contributed to art in what used to be a fishing village” and Leach actually moved into number 4 Barnaloft in the latter part of his life after he had given up potting.

Single Form With Two Hollows

Gillie brought two of Hepworth’s sculptures into the design for the Barnaloft/Piazza apartments – the bronze ‘Two forms in Echelon’ and ‘Single Form with Two Hollows’ at the east end of the building, and he championed local artists, holding an exhibition in the Guildhall to celebrate the granting of the Freedom of the borough of St Ives to Hepworth, Nicholson and Leach in the late 1960s.
Design Journal 1965

His design for the building won a medal from the ministry of Housing and Local Government in 1963. The award was for Good Design in Housing and the assessors recognised how the building had weathered well unlike previous winners of the award which had deteriorated rather quickly into an unkempt state.

One of the assessors for the award was Arthur Ling who was City Architect of Coventry between 1955 and 1964. We had been staying at the apartment building because my mother happens to know Ling’s daughter who now rents out the apartment to friends. Presumably Arthur Ling had judged the building worthy of the award in 1963 and then gone on to purchase one of the apartments as he liked it so much.

London's villages as per Abercrombie PlanArthur Ling also had a very interesting career, having previously been Chief Planning Officer for the London City Council – then the most prestigious office in the local authority sector – in the post war period when the authorities were considering how to rebuild the devastated city. London’s layout was at a ‘critical moment’ in its history, and in 1943 the County of London Plan, designed by Patrick Abercrombie and John H. Forshaw, was the first of two ambitious documents for post-war improvements to the capital. This was the forerunner to the Greater London Plan (the Abercrombie Plan) of 1944, and the film below was released by the Ministry of Information to explain the county plan. Abercrombie and Forshaw feature in the first two thirds of the film, and then Arthur Ling himself presents the planning concept of the Plan in the final third of the film.

The film, ‘The Proud City’, is fascinating for the old-fashioned, stilted delivery of its protagonists, as well as their concept of the new London as a series of neighbourhoods of around 10,000 inhabitants echoing the cluster of villages that characterised the ancient area. Their preoccupations with combating the dirt and disorder of the city with a utopian vision of a better, fairer city is a theme that is still in circulation with today’s regeneration programmes.

 

St I R&R

After the frenetic pace of work in the previous few weeks, July arrived with a sigh of relief because that meant it was time for our week’s rest and relaxation down in St Ives. The seven hour drive was pretty relentless but arriving on Saturday evening to our fabulous apartment with spectacular views across St Ives’ best beach made it all worth it. My son and I got straight into our swimmers and had an evening dip!

We were staying in a fantastic split level studio apartment in an iconic 1960s building. Designed by architect Henry Gilbert, the Piazza-Barnaloft apartment block won an architectural prize for its modern design which was awarded by Arthur Ling who had been the Chief Planning Officer for London until 1955. Ling had evidently liked the building so much he bought one of the flats, and here we were half a century later staying in that same flat, thanks to his daughter who is a friend of my mother.

Our bedroom balcony had views across the rooftops of St Ives and the main balcony overlooked Porthmeor Beach, a beautiful sandy beach with good waves for the body builders and surfers. I took photos all week from the balcony of the changing weather and changing tides.

Image credits: www.tate.org.uk

We were a few minutes’ walk from Tate St Ives with its magical Patrick Heron windows in the foyer. Up the steps and down the hill towards the seafront, was the Barbara Hepworth Museum which was based in the house and studio that she occupied for the last twenty five years years of her life and it was just how I remember it from my last visit almost two decades ago.

Image credit: www.barbara hepworth.org.uk

This time, there was a touch of pathos about seeing Barbara’s sculpture Two Forms (Divided Circle) which was her equivalent of the artist’s proof; she had made six versions, one of which had been standing in my local park for the past 35 year until it was recently stolen for scrap metal.

Image credit: www.barbarahepworth.org.uk

I loved the Hepworth Museum, originally known as Trewyn Studios, with its various connnected outbuildings where the stone was carved and its garden where the finished sculptures were displayed just as they had been while she lived there. Visiting the Leach Pottery another day I was struck again by how fine the line is between live and work for artists doing both in the same building. Bernard Leach installed a kiln in the pottery in 1923 which lasted longer than Leach’s three marriages! The kiln wasn’t replaced until after the end of his potting days in 1975. This was the same year Barbara Hepworth died in an accidental fire caused as a result of her nightly habit of a cigarette in bed, in the same room in which she started off stone carving her monumental sculptures.

We listened to an excellent local guide talking about Hepworth and bringing a more personal take to her story. He explained how she had walked past the tall walls of Trewyn Studios for ten years on the way back from doing her shopping, never knowing what was behind them; it wasn’t until the building came up for sale that she realised how perfect it was as a space in which to live and work. This aspect of the story particularly spoke to me as I am currently in the process of looking for a house and studio – I’ve looked for three months now and there are very few places that would work….if only there were a Trewyn Studio in London for me!

Every Two and a Bit Years

My fellow Teepee artists and I have just come back from a weekend in Stourbridge in the Midlands to see the Glass Biennale at the International Festival of Glass. As the name suggests, this has always been held every two years since 2004 until last year when it was put on hold because the building that housed the exhibition at the Ruskin Glass Centre needed renovating. Having become a regular fixture in the glass calendar, the Glass Biennale at the International Festival of Glass was always looked forward to on the August bank holiday weekend, but for some odd reason the new director this year decided to hold it instead in May. We were told this was so people didn’t have to wait a full three years before the next one but, frankly, this seemed an unnecessary complication. We would have rather waited the extra three months to see the glass in the sun. So it could have been the occasional drizzle and cold or it could have been the tighter hold on the finances by the new director, but somehow the whole festival felt a little flat.

Biennale

I was not alone in finding the layout of the Glass Biennale exhibition a little strange. There seemed to be very few wall panels, and also a surprisingly high proportion of object based work, but I felt that the three long tables with objects squeezed onto them didn’t really present the glass in its best light. Curator Matt Duran had apparently explained to the audience at the private view the night before that the layout was meant to be read as a kind of stage set, and I could understand this while we were sitting on the chairs that had been laid out like an audience for the glass show. However once I stood up and walked around to actually look at the glass, it felt more like a table sale with pieces jostling for space.

Despite what I thought was a great shame that each object had not been given space to breathe, there were some interesting juxtapositions set up because of the proximity. One area on the tallest table was given over to glass which looked more like archaeological artefacts that had just been dug up and brushed down. Rachel Elliot’s ammonite form ‘Crude’ was lovely and quite different from what she normally makes. I also really loved James Masktrey’s “Shackleton’s Scrimshaw” which were five bottles which looked like they were filled with sea mist and Shackleton’s historical documents suspended inside. The concerns with history and memories were echoed in Lisa Catherine Sheppy’s suspended ‘Lost Pockets’ which hung screenprinted and fused glass nuggets in sheer organza pockets. I also really liked the overall winner of the Biennale, a gorgeous cast piece by Ashraf Hanna that I just wanted to stare into and immerse myself in its depth of colour.

We wandered around the Ruskin Glass Centre in the afternoon, watching a painting demonstration by the delightful Cappy Thompson who had run a masterclass earlier in the week and listening to a choir who sung harmoniously as the sun came out. We saw Georgia Redpath’s lovely installation which showed the four stages of making her complex cast pieces and then had a chat with her in her studio, admiring her work. We had lots of other places in and around Stourbridge to visit as part of the International Festival of Glass. We saw an engraving exhibition at the Red House Glass Cone after which we sat outside for a chilly cup of tea as actors in historical dress finished their work showing visitors round the museum and headed home in full costume.

Following this, came a Church Crawl, visiting various churches in the area for their own wonderful stained glass such as this example from the Wordsley Methodist Church. In fact in the back of the church there was an exhibition run by Bruntnell Astley. Putting on an exhibition when one is a photographer, as Simon Bruntnell is, must be made easier by the fact one has so many wonderful images to choose from. It seems as though Simon was making a good job of it as he had sold quite a number of pieces, possibly more than at the Biennale. Many of his artists were also showing at the Biennale, including our old friend Nicholas Collins. We spotted a wonderful Georgia Redpath piece that had sold – it was being shown with a cardboard base, but there were arrangements for the base to be cast in bronze later on. The exhibition continued into the garden where there were some grand Jenny Pickford glass and metal sculptures. My favourite pieces of all were a delicious collection of objects by Elliot Walker, darkly textural black blown shapes, and a glass skull cast in a delicious lime green glass.

On Sunday we had just enough time to squeeze in a dash around another church despite the imminent baptism that was about to happen and a lecture back in the Ruskin Glass Centre before lunch. Before setting off back to London we went to see the exhibition of contemporary Hungarian Glass. A small but perfectly formed exhibition, we were debating between us how Péter Borkovics made his wonderful cast piece when the curator suddenly popped up in our midst and explained the technique in terms that made it seem almost simple compared to our convoluted imaginationary methods. We marvelled at the skills required to make ‘Japanese and Chinese’, a rather saucy depiction of two figures in a bath. I fell in love with a smooth jewel-like curl of cast glass by Lazslo Lukacsi, and its subtly irridescent surface inhabited my dreams as I snoozed in the car on the long journey back to London.