Entranced Glassworks
I’ve always loved glass and found the whole process of manufacture completely fascinating, taking grains of sand and creating a solid, colouring and shaping it into functional vessels and beautiful pieces of art. I remember a particular piece of my dad’s, a squat lentil-shaped vase with milky white veins through it that I would pick up and turn in my hands, looking at the shapes and patterns and feeling the heft and weight of it. I used to have an enormous collection of marbles of many different sizes, colours and finishes. Working with glass however always seemed unreachable, needing huge furnaces and fearsome heat.
When I met my wife Beth and moved up to live near Stourbridge, I was fascinated to hear the history of the area and it’s importance to the glass industry. We looked on and off for evening classes or a taster session so that I could experience working in a hot shop and creating my own piece but this never happened for various reasons. It was also my wife who first got me interested in miniatures. I made a very simple table, then another and a cupboard and suddenly I discovered I had filled a workshop with tools and several rooms of her dolls house and that of my mother-in-law.
At our first Miniatura show visit together some 15 years ago, of course the two glass greats of the scene Ray Storey and Phil Grenyer were present and showing their amazing work. Fair to say at that time the hook was well and truly set – to be able to create such beautiful pieces in miniature what something I wanted to be able to do! A year or two later we came across the works of Ken and Linda Batty at what must have been their first show. I must have talked to Ken for a good 30 minutes and decided that turning was the way to go. It transpired that I had no skill at that at all and so I went back to cabinet making for a while until the arrival of our 2 small children meant that the tools had to go away for a few years.
It was Beth who first read something about lampworking. Suddenly, actually you don’t need a whole huge glass workshop and a deep knowledge of chemistry to be able to make glass items, or several hundred pounds for a few hours of enjoyment, just a square of worktop, safety glasses and a (very noisy!!) propane burner. That arrived in March 2022 and since then, I have spent every spare moment at the torch. It was swiftly upgraded to a more efficient and much quieter propane/oxygen burner later that year. I am completely self-taught, working from many videos by some outstanding artists who have kindly shared their processes and work on YouTube.
From my 90cm slip of worktop standing by the washing machine in the utility room (that’s about the same size as a small stand at Miniatura), the workshop moved very briefly outside into an extremely cold caravan before it settled into its new home in the attic in November 2023. Once I could sit down and concentrate without fear of hot glass, ‘pings’ (shards of glass that snap off the rods at high speed) and small children, I started to try to work properly in 12th scale.
I work best with requests – if you have an image of something you like, talk to me and I’ll see what I can make! I was recently privileged to visit the workshop of Allister Malcolm, the resident artist at the Stourbridge Glass Museum who gave me permission to adapt his gorgeous Bubble Wrap technique for lampworking. If I could have afforded the original piece it would have come straight home with me! I have two sheets of paper pinned by my workstation with some of the works of the late Edward Hill to provide me with additional inspiration.
Miniatura Autumn 2023 will be my first ever show on the other side of the bench! I look forward to seeing you there
