Last Thursday evening Caithness Horizons in Thurso was the venue for presentations by the most recent cohort of artists to undertake a residency at North lands Creative Glass [NLCG], based in the small fishing village of Lybster on the east coast of Caithness. NLCG continues to develop as a world centre of excellence in the possibilities of glass as an art material, attracting artists from all over the world and from different formal backgrounds to experiment with new techniques while developing their professional portfolios.

For spring 2012, the residency invited artists to look at kiln forming and kiln casting. Megan Biddle and Carrie Inverson from the Unites States of America, and Melinda Willis and Jennifer Ashley King from Australia are the successful candidates this year, and all four took precious time out of their tight eight-week schedules to talk to the public about their work. Using beautifully produced digital slides, each artist gave an introduction to their work in general, before focusing on the work they’re undertaking during this residency in Caithness. For all of them, in common with most of the artists who have presented their work to the public at Caithness Horizons over several years now, the physical situation of the Lybster glass studios provides stimulation and inspiration. The impact of light and weather on a largely open landscape by the sea was a theme emerging from all four presentations.

Originally from Philadelphia, Megan Biddle is based in New York. Attracted by work using a diverse mix of materials and processes, she explained her interest in the idea of translation: of one form or material into another; from one idea to the next; from the specific to the abstract. Making a positive virtue out of working with whatever material is available, Biddle showed images of previous work with ice, feathers, beeswax – even her own skin. Using time-lapse video sequencing, she has made salt crystals on toothpicks appear like flowers growing in a box of earth. The same video technique is used for ‘Drawing with Time’ showing the effect of cracks forming in drying plaster. The emergence of patterns, apparently at random, yet with resulting beauty and mystery, is observed everywhere in Biddle’s work: fingerprints are magnified and create an other-worldly map of the artist’s own skin; toothpicks dipped in rubber seem to crawl against a wall with an organic will of their own. Significantly, Biddle described how coming to Lybster seems to have unlocked the use of colour in her work, something which even a trip to India has not done previously:

‘Although I find the colour [of the Caithness land and seascapes] quite subdued it seems very accessible to me… In India I almost couldn’t let the colour in’.

Carrie Inverson is the other American on the residency. From Virginia, she moved to California just before coming to Lybster. A printmaker by training, Inverson suggested her journey into the use of glass came from its use in allowing her to build up layers of images within her work, incorporating what she called ‘ghosts’ from which the viewer may interpret meaning. Reflecting this theme, one slide in her presentation included a quote from Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer: ‘Often the shadow is more real than the body’. The shadowy quality of communication is a major theme in Inverson’s work, and she described how she often starts with a found object and then abstracts it to explore ‘alternative vocabularies… how there are different types of language and means of communication’. Movingly, she talked of how she had created work on this theme from the fact of her philosopher father’s affliction with Althzeimer’s disease, abstracting from knots of wood he had given her to suggest a dialogue between them. The Iraq war had inspired a shift in her work to operating on a larger scale to make political statement with her Iraq war memorials, literally giving faces and names to dead American soldiers as well as the Iraqi dead. In Lybster she is also using found objects as the starting point for new glass art.

Jennifer Ashley King is very clear that the multi-cultural nature of her native home in Melbourne, Australia, has been a fundamental dimension in her artistic development. The high-rise architecture of the city with its colourful night skyline has fed her imagination to generate an interest in planes and surfaces, and in the work of artists like Russian Naum Gabo, his sculptor brother Ataine Pevsner, Spanish architect and sculptor Santiago Calatrava, dECOi and Marien Karel. King had wanted the chance of working in the Lybster glass studios to experience what she called the ‘unique space and light’, enabling her to develop ideas she had been working on. With light and space as her main themes, she has been exploring the sense of weightlessness that can be achieved with glass. Having created many pieces with clear glass which is only partially fired and then slumped, exploring surface and structure, she is further experimenting with how she can extend the kiln technique. Like Megan Biddle, King has been surprised to find that Lybster has introduced the use of colour to her work. From clear glass, which absorbs light and colour, she had previously been working with black glass, which reflects it: ‘Even when I went to Mexico I didn’t get colour!’

Fellow Australian Melinda Willis lives and works in Canberra. Although Canberra is the capital of the continent, Willis explained that it seems to her a small city compared to her native Adelaide: ‘I am passionate about working in a small community with such a lot of committed artists’. Taking inspiration from artists Gabriella Bisseto and Jessica Loughlin, Willis underlined how she’d ‘learned from them the importance of hard work, and how if you want to be an artist you must live it every day’. The relationship that glass has with light, and how glass interacts with architecture and the urban environment are favourite themes. Reflections of objects seen in glass provides a source of ideas, and since coming to Lybster she has been particularly interested in how our double-glazing provides novelty there. One technique she uses is to print images onto panes of glass using ceramic ink.

The North Lands Creative Glass studios where these four artists are hard at work preparing for the end of their residency is on the main street in Lybster village, perched above a beautiful small working pier. At this time of year, visitors who venture down the narrow winding road to the pier lighthouse will see a picture postcard, bijou picnic site. Whether it’s the presence and subliminal impact of nearby of prehistoric sites like the Camster Cairns and the Hill O’ Many Stanes, or simply the elemental grandeur of the light and space on the eastern seaboard of Caithness, NLCG residency artists always comment positively on the effect of their time there. This year is no exception.

The public can visit the Alistair Pilkington Studio, Main Street, Lybster on Saturday 2nd June, 10am-4pm to see for themselves what that effect has been.

Source: Caithness Horizons