I have bought a kiln

Yes! It just somehow happened without my having planned to buy one. This belonged to Shirley Palmer and is in immaculate condition. A trusted source, and a fair price which included various kiln bits and moulds. I am looking forward to playing. Mind you, I haven't really thought this through. Where is it going to go; what about a source of water - special sink, mess area, etc. etc. Is it big enough? Never mind. Get the equipment and then solve the logistics. Now I can really start learning.

Screen printing

An excellent day with Kirsty Brookes who was generous in sharing her time and knowledge. I played about with my ampersand theme and felt I moved forward. Not least because Kirsty suggested a solution to a fixtures & fittings problem that had been bugging me. Interesting to get a glimpse on a new technique - will try it again. I think this must be the first time I have been whole-heartedly positive on a kiln day. Awfully good on useful little snippets of information. Shame they can't all be like this. Made me wonder if I'd made the right decision about doing this course instead of the Central St Martins one -- it was more expensive, but I'm sure quality learning, like today, and without the irritating assessment constraints.

Pure - voting

Top left is the one we chose to make next Monday - a nice simple concept and one we felt we could accomplish. Mine is the one with the spheres and spirals, which the group (rightly) felt might not be constructable in the time. As I quite emphatically did not want mine to be chosen, that was fine. Diplomatically, or coincidentally, each of us got 1 vote from another person. I thought they were all imaginative, and would like to know how people would have varied their designs without a time or finance constraint. Obviously both these exist in the real world, and it is useful to be reminded of that.

Lettering day

I am just back from a Glass Engraver's Guild day on italic lettering with John Nash. Extremely invigorating and eye-opening. I begin to know what to look for in letterforms. We did exercises (like this one) all day and very relaxing and good fun it was too. I think one-day events are well worth doing as there is a lot of motivation in the room and people come to get and give ideas. So far, this blog has talked quite little about engraving -- I'm treading water at the moment. I was getting on better when I was less well informed. Lost my innocence now and not replaced it with expertise.

My first V&A-inspired

lead-dead; handled handles; mother-of-Vita; n'est-ce pas une pipe; shelltered
I layed out a little trail of installations for Stephen when he came back from Canada, playing with ideas inspired by Sue Lawty's work in the textile gallery at the V&A. Here are 5 of them. The idea is to 'fuse' glass with mudlarked objects. I think I might experiment with taking one of these further forward in the workshop tomorrow.

Pure project -- maquette

My model of the gym - to scale (2cm=1m) . I've adapted my first idea in fact because it wasn't viable within the time scale -- i.e. in 3 hours 7 of us have to assemble it in the gym, photograph it and take it down. I don't think anything will prove viable, actually. But perhaps that's the point. Maybe we're meant to learn that our site-specific project won't work without tight time management. So lots of compromise on interpreting the brief. Result is that my reading of 'pure' is 'plain' or 'simple'. As opposed to: absolute; genuine; unalloyed; spotless; disinterested; chaste; utter; in tune; clear ... etc. etc

Inspired by

Sue Lawty; wrought iron pots c. 1700; Dobson wallpaper; art-nouveau grille
I went to the V&A on Sunday and got inspired by these things in the collection. I thought I might do something for the Adult Learner's exhibition. I've left it a bit late, as it has to be finished by 17 February. I don't think I've got time -- but I'll have a go at the design anyway.

Pure -- paper installation project

This is the gym at WAES. We've to make a paper installation filling the whole of the gym imagining it is for a paper manufacturer who wants it to express the word 'pure'. Today we looked at books and talked about it. For the next 2 weeks, we'll be making maquettes. Then, select the best one and make it life-size in the gym. I'll be surprised if we actually manage it in the time, but I've got my idea. Just for once I am going to stick with the first idea, because I really want to get on with the design for my site-specific project which I am really looking forward to doing.

First day of the Spring Term

Tube strike: arrived late at Morley College. Set up drills. Power failure. Got started on some polishing samples -- experimenting with shades of grey. Good idea. Prob did only an hour's worth of actual work.

So to WAES for (allegedly) an 'exciting largescale 3D project'. Tutor didn't arrive (all of us managed to navigate the closed tube stations). We discussed the exhibition venue for a bit. Went home.

Total day - left house 9.30; arrived back 5.30. Total travelling time: 3hrs. Achieved: a few little squares of differently shaded white engraving. Such productivity!

London Glassblowing

I went to see Peter Layton today with a view to collaborating on a number of writing projects to tie in with his 30th anniversary year. He gave me this book as a 'thank you' for spending the bulk of Sunday (probably) writing something for him. I'm happy to do this and I think we both felt we were going to get on well together. But, hey, a £40 book which I can get half price as his publisher is the same as mine isn't a quid pro quo. It's curious -- and I think fairly general -- that one craftsperson forgets to value what another craftsperson does appropriately. You can get wobbly writing just as you can get wobbly glass. I'm not complaining; just musing. After all, what I want from Peter is some way of being able to come and blow glass in his studio without it costing an arm and a leg. And that wouldn't be a quid pro quo for this particular project either. But the door might be opening a crack -- this is pretty much the only place in London where I could get to practise blowing. And if I'm pleased with my wobbly goblets then I should understand why non-writers are proud of their writing. Anyone can write, can't they?

Jelly and fans

A blog 'fan' -- yes, I do have some -- liked my jelly glass entry and told me about a San Francisco artist called Liz Hickok who depicts her city in jelly. I've borrowed one of her pix and it should link to her site where there are more.

Found the pictures

The exhibition pix that got stuck in the camera have been found (see Wasted Day). Here's my exhibition table from last term. Next term begins on Monday 9th and I am not ready for it. Had intended to do lots of designing, but the Festive Season as well as seeing Stephen in as the Master of the Art Workers Guild for the year has zapped all glass creative energy and channelled it elsewhere.

Jelly glass

I don't mean jelly glasses as in glasses for jelly, but playing with jelly as you might with kiln-formed colours. These are stripes of jelly (not packet) set within hollowed-out oranges. Then cut in quarters longways. A pretty effect. You could do this with glass -- one technique being hot and the other cold. Which is easier to control or predict? I'm not sure. Another seasonal deployment of creativity. Should I be getting back to my sketchbook?

6 glasses each on Christmas Day

In addition to the 4 shown on the table were champagne glasses and jelly glasses for the kumquats in orange brandy. What a pleasure to have all the right kit for a festive table. Also visible is a slumped glass plate decorated with orchids (centrepiece) and white asparagus wrapped in smoked salmon ribbons. The coup de grace was also in an asparagus form -- ice cream pressed into 19th century pewter moulds, with perfect green tips.

For the last 2 weeks all creativity has gone into Christmas. I even based my Christmas card on the cube project.

2nd Floor space

Today I went to see the venue for my 'location-specific project'. This is it. The view is from the lift looking straight ahead and I have my eye on the window furthest to the right of the group of 4. It is inset by about 11 cm so I could trap something within a double-glazed panel. That neatly solves my health and safety problems. The offices will be open plan, so if I use the full height, it will be seen from all offices.

Disheartening term end

Here I am at the weekend wondering what to do with a bunch of cubes. Realise I have been putting energy into objects I don't want and can't find space for. Yes, it was all about learning, but the way the term fizzled out felt a bit like slow-cooking a complex dish, putting it out on a carefully laid table -- and then no one came to eat it.

Wasted day

No pix of my 'assessment display' because I've shot them on the internal memory of my camera and have no idea how to transfer them. Anyway, what a farce! Each of us went through a charade of presenting our work to the tutors while the other students sat in the canteen twiddling their thumbs. An entire day of nothing achieved and nothing learned while next door the potters were happily potting, with no need to do all this ludicrous form-filling. At least if we had all listened to each other's spiel about our work, that would have been worth-while, but yesterday was costly both in emotional energy and in extra (and unnecessary) expenditure. Do we get to assess the way the course is run, I wonder?

Cut, opened out and slumped

Here are 3 more versions of the cube: cut across to make two hexagons, which I have reshaped, engraved and glued side by side. The middle one represents the solid opened out into its component slices and copper-foiled - the mottled effect is created by sandblasting the back of a mirror. The 'bra cup' shape is what happened when I allowed a cast cube to slump by itself.

Still floating

Next Thursday is our assessment day and the end of the cube project -- hurrah! But actually, after a bored patch, I started to enjoy it again. Even now I don't feel I have squeezed everything I could out of it. There's a lot you can do with float glass. I am still hoping, for instance, to do something out of white float, but the bit I have ordered hasn't arrived yet. I nevertheless have 10 pieces to show (5 requested). None are beautifully finished, but I now know what I should have done to improve them. If our group had been allotted lead glass instead of float, I think I would have gone the extra mile and spent time on hand-finishing a perfect cube because of the optical illusions one could then get by engraving one, or maybe two, sides.

Diced cubicles

I've got the 1 and the 6 and I quite like the 'diced' word-play, even though it's slicing; not dicing. But anyway, which arrangement shall I go for? And there are lots more. Nice effect when polished; and I was trying different polishing effects.

Bleigiessen

All the WAES groups went to visit the glass installation by Thomas Heatherwick at the Wellcome Trust. These are my pictures seen from level 3 and level 7 (the top) of the the building. It's an amazing achievement, but completely didn't work for me as it's meant to represent the pouring of bleigiessen into water - nothing we have all done over many years has ever looked like this. Also odd not to use lead crystal glass. And what's it really got to do with what the Wellcome represents.

Door in Cumbria

I am now working on the first of my site-specific projects. This one is for a door joining the inside of a Victorian Cumbrian vicarage to the outside porch. Here's the space it will close off and two trial effects using the curtain motif in one and details from a Chinese painting hanging next to the door in the other. Both have been done in PhotoShop as rough visualisations.

Cubic boredom

I intended to finish with the cube project today as I am terminally bored with it now and want to move on, but I am still grinding away at a curved surface on one of them and trying to slump another through a potato masher (picture shows Heath-Robinson-like structure). I really feel that interesting as it has been to think around the cube (as it were) the actual mechanics of sufficient workshop time (and reasonable equipment) are disheartening in the extreme.

A smashed cube gave rise to these two developments from the original: 'Wear it' (personal dig at the 'Wear it, Flaunt it' exhibition of glass jewellery now showing at the Oxo Tower Gallery), and 'Rocks'. Smashed unworked cube cut from the fritted block. Each of the four sections have been differently cold-worked: a) drill-engraved to emphasise the strata naturally formed by the fritted glass, b) lathe cut to mimic a crystalline structure, c) smoothed and partially polished to make it look like jade, d) as a) and additionally sandblasted. Oil-paints have been rubbed into some abraided areas for extra emphasis.

Engraved lettering

I couldn't upload this picture before as these 4 glasses were for Vita's birthday (yesterday). I blew them with Martin and engraved them with her name at home. The plate is for my 3rd cousin Hannah who has the same birthday as I do.