MENTION glass and most folk think first of window panes, drinking vessels, or dinky ornaments – things to be handled gingerly.

FOR many, the word ‘sculpture’ still brings to mind half-clad alabaster statues staring into infinity. Four artists currently engaged in a residency based jointly at North Lands Creative Glass [NLCG] and the Scottish Sculpture Workshop [SSW] give the lie to all preconceptions.

Sculptors Clare Flatley and Kate Hobby, and glass artists Katya Filmus and Lisa Anne Bate, gave presentations last week at Caithness Horizons in Thurso, showing slides from their back catalogues of work as well as introducing the local audience to work-in-progress for a Metal and Glass Casting residency offered this year by the two Caithness and Aberdeenshire arts organisations.

Katya Filmus mixing plaster

The eight week residency is an opportunity to create new work and to collaborate with other artists while also learning new techniques in casting.  It also poses a huge challenge for participants, not least travelling between the two venues while having to absorb entirely new skills and techniques for working in media they are unfamiliar with.

Undaunted by the sheer mountain of new information to be taken on board, all four artists have already produced experimental pieces, and are clearly buzzing with new ideas.

Clare Flatley & Kate Hobby learning about glass with NLCG technician Michael Bullen

Originally from Israel, Katya Filmus began her career with figurative sculpture, working under a Russian tutor, and has since experimented with a wide range of media, including Raku pottery, porcelain fixtures and latex.

For a time in Jerusalem she designed a range of glass products for manufacture, and has been commissioned by Glenfiddich distillery for a major glass casting project which will see a series of large cast stags’ heads installed in 21 airports around the world.

During her presentation she described her fascination with exploring the capacity of work in glass to reflect ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ facets of an object in three dimensions, as well as how autobiography often inspires ideas for pieces.

Clare Flatley is a new graduate.  As an undergraduate she had been intrigued by process and materials, and by the absorbant and reflective qualities of materials and surfaces.  The properties of the colour black along with the idea of anti-matter has provoked a series of works to develop textures and forms that are ‘chaotic’, while also very beautiful.

Doorways and portals provide a metaphor to explore the duality of surface.  Like Katya Filmus, the antithetical relationship between ‘front’ and ‘back’ provides for Clare a dimension to be explored in glass and metal.

Lisa Anne Bate constructing her mould

Lisa Anne Bate also wants to stretch form to experiment with scientific ideas.  Microscopic life and minerals have inspired the creation of sculptural shapes and connected elements – often based on everyday objects – to suggest a visualization of new ‘species’.

Often working on a small scale, the artist likes to create sculpture that isn’t static:  she has used magnets to provide connection between glass and metal, and to make elements move.  Resulting forms often seem sinister and unsettling, causing the viewer to look again.

A chance opportunity to pour iron provided the catalyst for a change in artistic direction for Sussex-based sculptor Kate Hobby.  Now used to working with metal on a large scale, Kate described how overwhelming it has been to engage with a whole new medium: glass.

The residency is providing her with the space and the peace to develop new ideas, and – building out from a woven basket-form piece cast recently in bronze, her intention is to develop a weaving ‘loom’ sculpture during her time in Lumsden and Caithness.

Over the years NLCG has brought many artists from around the globe to its Lybster studios, and its reputation as a centre of excellence for the spectrum of glass-working continues to grow.  Over the past three years, visitors to Caithness Horizons have been given privileged insight into the imaginative, technical and physical challenges of the medium, and treated to slideshows of images that merely hint at the multiplicity of colour, texture, form and thematic ambition of artefacts produced by extremely gifted residency artists.

The current residency continues the trend of excellence, with the added interest of asking artists to stretch themselves by combining glass and metal casting.  NLCG and SSW are to be congratulated on maintaining what has become a very rare thing in the arts:  a commitment to providing artists with the time, space and resources to develop new skills and produce truly original art.

Christine Gunn is the Education & Community Officer at Caithness Horizons.

© Christine Gunn, 2011

Links

• Caithness Horizons
• North Lands Creative Glass
• Scottish Sculpture Workshop

THIS YEAR’S annual North Lands Creative Glass Conference – the culmination of a year-round programme of workshops, residencies and other events – was overshadowed by the recent death of Dan Klein, one of North Lands’ founder directors.

Alastair Pilkington Studio, Lybster

Klein’s charming, helpful and erudite presence was sorely missed and his loss keenly felt. Klein founded North Lands in 1996 along with Iain Gunn and Robert Maclennan. To many it seemed an unlikely venture: setting up a visionary centre of excellence on the cliffs of the ‘Grey Coast’. But, confounding its critics and with strong local, national and international support, North Lands flourished, each year becoming more enterprising and intellectually stimulating.

Klein was always there – strongly present and supportive – but never upstaging. His friendship with so many of the world’s leading glass artists, gallery owners and curators coupled with his enthusiasm and expertise were largely responsible for establishing North Lands as one of Europe’s principal centres in studio glass.

Klein made a particularly valuable contribution to North Lands over the past eighteen months as Honorary Artistic Director, giving freely of his advice and time in spite of failing health. He was responsible for this year’s master classes and conference and was still discussing arrangements from his sick bed a few days before he died.

With his life partner of twenty-two years, Alan J. Poole, Klein bought St. Mary’s Church in Lybster where they intended to house their extensive collection of British and Irish Contemporary Glass. For various practical reasons the project couldn’t be realised. However, it was his hope that, in the future, the building could be incorporated into the North Lands set-up.

The collection itself is to be donated to the National Museums of Scotland in the near future. This is a collection of some three-hundred pieces of work dating from several decades ago to the present day and will be an important and substantial addition to the NMS glass collection.

Klein had a varied career as a gallery owner and opera singer before becoming one of the world’s acknowledged experts in glass. Tributes were paid to the variety and diversity of Klein’s life by Lani McGregor of Bullseye Glass and Peter and Sasha Alexander with whom Klein collaborated musically and toured Scotland as a trio in the 1970s. Lord Maclennan of Rogart contributed a moving eulogy, quoting Matthew Arnold’s monody, ‘Thyrsis’ – dedicated to his fellow poet Arthur Hugh Clough.

The conference itself offered much in the way of information and discursive ideas and was a tribute both to Klein’s imaginative programming and his impressive array of professional contacts. Speakers included the art historian Elizabeth Conran, Museum Director Anne Vanlatum, from Sars-Poteries, Czech artist Dana Zámecníková and the ebullient US artist Therman Statom.

Keynote speaker, Clare Johnston, Head of Textiles at the Royal College of Art, has worked as a colour consultant in both fashion and interior design for illustrious names such as Marks & Spencer and Liberty. The use of colour, she suggested, should not conform to fixed ideas, reinforcing her personal credo that “rules are made to be broken,” adding that “the use of colour in products and the retail environment has a very powerful impact; apparently the brain registers and reacts to colour before anything else”.

Dutch glass designer Mieke Groot has been inspired by the colours and patterns of West Africa and maintains a working base in Mali. Inspired by local artefacts, textiles and jewellery her approach to colour and texture was transformed by her first journey to the region about fifteen years ago.

French artist Udo Zembok discussed the paradoxical idea of the ‘invisibility of light’. Glass offers infinite possibilities for creating effects derived from light and colour, particularly with Zembok’s preferred technique of fusing together plates of differently coloured glass.

Kaffe Fassett, by now almost a household name and famed for his knitted patterns of vivid colour, his quilting and diverse publications talked with inspired enthusiasm about his joy in the world of colour. His work celebrates these enthusiasms and acts as an inspiration to others. Fassett sees the world as an endless array of pattern, form and colour and almost anything – from painted fences and gardens to deck chairs – can act as the starting point for his designs.

Stein Klein worked as a career executive living the corporate commuter life in California before being bitten by the glass bug, spending an inspirational time at Dale Chihuly’s Pilchuck Glass School in Washington. His work could be described as either inspired by or derivative of the work of other artists, depending on one’s point of view. For Klein, the bold motifs and patterning of Brancusi, Malevich and Mondrian act as a constant source of fascination and his bold simplified glass forms – often expressed as circles and squares – testify to this.

Despite the undercurrent of loss, the conference, which attracted nearly eighty participants from around the globe, demonstrated the strength and diversity of studio glass and its complex relationship with fine art.

© Giles Sutherland, 2009

Links

• North Lands Creative Glass Conference 2009
• North Lands Creative Glass

TINA ROSE looks ahead to a celebration of 30 years of Scottish Glass

IT IS particularly appropriate that Migrate, an exhibition celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Scottish Glass Society, will launch in the Highlands, a place that is home to North Lands, the international centre of excellence in glass, and an area where people understand the conflicting emotions of migration.

The exhibition in Inverness will bring together work by thirty glass artists from across Scotland examining the different ways they express a sense of place and identity.

Many of these artists have themselves ‘migrated’, drawn to Scotland to work or study, travelling from Europe, Japan, America and England, and have simply never wanted to leave.

Work by Angela Steel

The exhibition was juried by Dan Klein, a founding director of North Lands Creative Glass, and was curated by glass artists Jessamy Kelly and Carrie Fertig.

The society promotes artists at all stages of their careers, so work by established and internationally recognised artists, such as Keiko Mukaide and Alison Kinnaird MBE, will be shown alongside emerging artists and recent graduates such as Emma Lindsay and Julia Malle, who trained at Edinburgh College of Art, the only Scottish art college still teaching glass.

Highland artists Kim Bramley, based on Skye, and Nichola Burns of Glasstorm in Tain are among the group selected to take part in the show, which will include cast, etched, engraved, slumped, fused, blown, leaded, stained and painted panels, forms and sculptural pieces.

As part of their celebrations they are also holding the Migrate Conference on 31 October 2009 at the National Museum of Scotland. This is open to everyone interested in glass in Scotland, and will feature a selection of talks from some of the artists in the exhibition alongside Rose Watban, senior curator applied art & design at National Museums Scotland and Emma Walker, chief executive of craftscotland. Booking form and information can be found on their website.

The Scottish Glass Society plays an important role in developing contemporary glassmaking in Scotland, promoting the development of the art and the craftsmanship of glass making and its many variations in Scotland. Its aim is to advance the public appreciation of glass making as an art form and to champion the work of glass artists in Scotland by organising exhibitions and events for glassmakers, collectors, historians and enthusiasts.

This exhibition will be a unique insight into the art of Scottish glass artists, and the moving and possibly controversial theme of migration, is a challenging way to celebrate 30 years of Scottish glass.

The exhibition runs at the following venues:

Inverness Museum & Art Gallery, Castle Wynd, Inverness IV2 3EB, from 4 July to 1 August 2009.

Broadfield Glass Museum, Compton Drive, Kingswinford, West Midlands DY6 9NS, 14 November to 21 March 2010

© Tina Rose, 2009

Links

• Scottish Glass Society

We are sorry to report the very sad news of the death of Dan Klein on Saturday 27th June 2009. Dan who was one of the driving forces of North Lands Creative Glass is a great loss not only to all creative glass practitioners but to the wider arts world.

Gallery

Liz Rowley - Routes Of Passage

Jessamy Kelly - Wings Overview

Work by Karen Akester

Work by Alec Galloway

Mac Jacquard - Sleep

Light In The North

REGRETTABLY this current exhibition on display at IMAG contains only a fraction of the work shown in the exhibition catalogue celebrating North Lands 10th anniversary as an international centre of excellence in the art of glass.

North Lands Creative Glass, located at Lybster on the east coast of Caithness, is a state of the art facility drawing glass artists, sculptors, architects, painters and designers from all over the world to participate in master classes, residencies and conferences.

The exchange of ideas between different artistic disciplines whilst exploring the art of glass is one of the most exciting aspects of North Lands’ programme. The centre is also an example of how specialist training in the arts combined with its inspirational location can be an asset to the region and an important site of international creative exchange.

The creative possibilities of glass as a material have expanded enormously in recent years to include sculpture, installation, conceptual work and architecture. Works by Marianne Buus, Phil Atrill, Karl Hawron, Loretta Lowman, Joel Philip Myers, Bettina Visentin, Richard Whitely, Bibi Smith, Kirstie Rae, Nick Wirdnam and Naoko Sato display a varied range of techniques as part of this exhibition from North Lands permanent collection.

There are some breathtaking examples exploring the unique qualities of glass as a material, its capacity for light refraction, density, colour and texture. There is also fluidity between ideas about craft and art evident in many of the pieces which explore ideas as well as the glassmaking process.

Marianne Buus has contributed a beautifully fluid, almost unstable looking piece, “Untitled”, which reminded me of watching glass being crafted, molten, billowing, solid and liquid at the same time. Two black ribbed vessels of irregular shape have a spun quality to them, a black ashen matt on the outside gleaming glass within like the heart of a kiln.

Karl Hawron’s “Vessel Artefact No 4” has the pearly opalescent appearance of natural shell and the look of fine porcelain. White and pale yellow with fused pieces around the rim, this work gives the simultaneous appearance of being created by a human hand through the bowl form and acted upon by nature in the surface treatment and coloration.

Another highlight was Richard Whitely’s “Untitled” rectangular piece with a rough edge, containing extraordinary density and intensity like the flattened lens of a giant eye. I would love to have seen light pass through this piece and to be able to view it at eye height.

Loretta Lowman’s “Sky, Sea, Earth” in three layers with a cast glass fish tail emerging from the top, contrasted frosted glass with the icy temperature of deep green ocean at its centre. The movement in this work together with the sensory experience of looking at it was unexpected.

Another work inspired by the sea is Phil Atrill’s “Man of War”, two pieces connected by a heavy rusted chain, the pod like stinging jellyfish form and a large crystal ball of glass forever tethered together. Traces of sand and rusted metal contrast with the pure translucence and water like consistency of the ball of glass, each playing off the other.

The ever present lack of space and light in two rooms designated as gallery space in IMAG means that only 11 works out of over 55 have been exhibited and not to their best advantage. All of the work is displayed at belly height on low white plinths with the only light source spotted from the ceiling.

Such display of important work by a centre such as North Lands is an embarrassment to Inverness as a city and source of consistent disappointment to anyone trying to view art work within this designated space.

A coat of paint and track lighting does not constitute significant refurbishment or a commitment to the gallery function at IMAG, nor does it reflect the importance and significance of creative work taking place all over the Highlands and Islands.

Continuing to display work in secondary spaces as after-thought does nothing to promote one of the region’s greatest assets. I fail to see why basic display equipment and techniques present in private galleries in the region are not afforded by our exhibitions unit.

Whilst plans for a new gallery/ museum are progressing the lack of attention to the gallery function during this transitional phase is cause for concern. This visible indifference to a high standard of public access to art is even more glaring in this focus year and in the presentation of international works from North Lands inspiring permanent collection.

© Georgina Coburn, 2007

Links

• North Lands Creative Glass

GILES SUTHERLAND looks back at proceedings at the Northlands Creative Glass 2005 Conference.

IN THE KEVIN COSTNER film ‘Field of Dreams’ a mysterious voice intones the enigmatic phrase – “if you build it, they will come”. This, in fact, referred to a baseball pitch carved out of a maize field in Iowa, but could equally well apply to the inspired vision to build an international centre for glass in Lybster on the Caithness coast.

Established in 1996, Northlands Creative Glass has gone from strength to strength with a year-round programme of residencies, master-classes and an annual conference held during the first week of September.

This year’s event addressed the idea of ‘design’ as an essential component in the processes and functions of glass art. The varied range of speakers came from different areas of art and craft and were not confined solely to the small but vibrant international glass community.
 
In the keynote speech Gordon Burnett, Reader in Craft at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, considered how computer-aided design “has altered the classical logic by which forms are signally informed by a mode of construction”.
 Despite the impenetrable jargon Burnett did show how technological developments have changed both design and manufacturing processes in recent years. But surely this is part of an evolutionary continuum? Technology usually always affects methodology, both in predictable and unexpected ways.

An object can often be idealised, intensified or even transformed by the accomplished photographer.

Continuing this theme Gilbert Riedelbauch showed how forms can now be designed on computer in three dimensions and these ideas translated into physical prototypes literally at the click of a mouse. The hewing and crafting of objects and the various stages between idea and product have now been reduced to a series of simple steps.

Designer/maker Simon Moore looked at the current state of blown glass design and offered insights into future developments. Moore noted: “An artistic imagination coupled with skill is talent. Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art”. It was very tempting to go along with Moore’s assessment but with one proviso: there is, sometimes, technical skill in what he loosely labels ‘modern’ art; there is also, sometimes, great intellectual skill.

Andrew Page, Editor of the New York-based ‘Glass Quarterly’, looked at the role of photography in recording, promoting and interpreting glass art – an object can often be idealised, intensified or even transformed by the accomplished photographer. The moral: your work may be of the highest standard but unless it is professionally photographed it will have little chance of being published in an international quality journal.

Jeweller Susan Cohn in a dense and uncompromisingly ‘post-modern’ lecture ranged far and wide through street culture, virtual reality, love songs and uncool craft in an attempt to illustrate how design issues are addressed and translated from idea into object. It was fun, but both lecture and lecturer seemed oddly incongruous in the poetic, still setting of a Highland fishing village. Perhaps that was part of the charm.

© Giles Sutherland, 2005
 

Related Link

• North Lands Creative Glass website

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