North Lands Creative Glass, Lybster, Caithness, 6-7 September 2003

FROM HUMBLE beginnings in the early 1990s North Lands Glass – based in the coastal village of Lybster, Caithness – has grown from strength to strength. As well as an ambitious year-round programme of workshops and artists’ residences, the centre also hosts an annual conference which brings together the international world of art in glass. This year’s theme was Landscape and Nature, well chosen given the strong connection between the natural world and the work of many glass-makers.

But forget specialisms and anorak tendencies, this get-together dispensed with the insular musings of the academic world. Makers – and the occasional theorist – from a wide variety of disciplines (wood sculpture, painting, museums) came together to share knowledge and ideas.

Tina Oldknow (Curator at Corning Museum) opened with the apparently impossible observation that ‘actual landscapes…are not that different from landscapes constructed by artists’. By way of explanation, she continued, ‘when we look at a landscape we always construct it: we give visual and emotional weight to some elements more than others. And each time we look at it there is the possibility for change’.

In greatly contrasting style Karen Willenbrink-Johnsen’s earthy, no-nonsense approach, delivered in her unmistakable Mid-West twang made clear her love of nature in its many forms – animals, plants, trees. Her passion was deep and expressed with consummate craftsmanship in her complex glass forms depicting, horses, dogs (including a poodle in a pink tutu!).

I liked the angular muscularity of the work of Frenchman, Bernard Dejonghe, whose passion for geology, geomorphology and prehistory came through strongly. Blurring the boundaries between glass-making, ceramics and sculpture, Dejonghe’s work (vast chunky crystalline forms) was simply breath-taking. It would have been inspiring to have seen (and touched) them, rather than merely looking.

In a programme so diverse and exciting it’s perhaps unfair to pick out a ‘star’, but for my money the most compelling talk was Monica Edmondson’s account of her Sami ancestry in northern Sweden and how deeply imbedded cultural traditions (on the brink of oblivion only a few years ago) were informing her work as a contemporary glass artist.

The sense of snow, light, darkness, sound, and colour of these vast circumpolar spaces suffused her work (with glass as an ideal medium for such expression). Bold and subtle, ancient and contemporary, Edmondson’s work bridged the seemingly unbridgeable gap between traditional and modern cultures.

North Lands has a wide appeal, and appropriately the programme was rounded off by David Nash, a sculptor who needs no introduction to a British audience. Whether following the progress, over decades, of an oak “boulder” placed in a Welsh stream or again, via photographs, the growth of a circle of ash trees lovingly planted and tended by the wood artist, Nash showed the importance of cross-over skills which lie behind the North Lands ethos.

© Giles Sutherland, 2003