Cutting edge

Glassy: ‘Dogfight’ by Geoffrey Mann

There is something almost mystical and yet recognisable about the milky swirls flitting through the icy, clear glass blocks in artist Geoffrey Mann’s piece “Dogfight”. Their frozen flow is akin to the unpredictable direction a raindrop takes running down a windowpane – though Mann came by them in an even more random manner. Also a digital artist, he tracked the flights of two moths in seeming combat – at 2,000 frames per second – and recorded their captured trajectories by transposing them into glass. Indeed, if perceptions of decorative glass suggest discreet decanters and polite vases then Mann’s intellectual and engaging work could not be a better counter.

“The piece is really just a very expensive flick-book,” Mann jokes. “But it’s also suggestive of a certain attitude in working with glass. If you stick within the established boundaries you do tend to come up with the same old things. Glass is actually a great medium for experimentation and we’re seeing more of that now.”

One of Jenny Beardshall’s glass balloons

Certainly Mann is not alone in his readiness to explore new approaches to “decorative” glass. Paul Stopler’s sand-blasted pieces seem to suggest alien geology and Joseph Harrington uses cast glass to create shelving that appears to be melting. London’s annual New Designers show (staged in July) is also witnessing a growing band of young designers working in the medium – such as New Designers Pulse Award winner Jenny Beardshall, with her whimsical glass balloons.

A rediscovery of long-neglected techniques has also helped spark a renewed interest in contemporary glass. Shan Valla, whose “Glass Garden” installation was shown by Cockpit Arts at the Craft Council’s annual Collect show last weekend, uses lampwork methods involving melting rods of glass more typically employed to make scientific instruments. Heather Gillespie is practicing a rarely used glass technique of copper wheel abrading learnt at the Kamenicky Senov glass college in the Czech Republic.

Joanne Mitchell, who early in her career was supported by the National Glass Centre (established in Sunderland in 1998 to support contemporary glass production in the UK) uses diamond wheel cutting to create surface texture, in contrast to the more conservative styles she was trained in at Edinburgh Crystal. “Different methods of working glass are coming on all the time as the contemporary market grows, which feeds back into that growth,” she says.

Says Rosie Greenlees, executive director of the Crafts Council, “There’s been radical change, even in the 10 years since I graduated. Interest in glass is being driven by the broad variety of work going on in the field now. Glass is a material we’re very familiar with but there’s also an increasingly diverse interpretation of the material now ... it’s responding more to the world around us and that familiarity is being challenged.”

And that is certainly important to collectors. “The old debate as to whether glass is an art or a craft has limited interest among fine art galleries but that situation is improving,” says Alan Poole, director of North Lands Creative Glass glassmaking school and of art glass dealers Dan Klein Associates, which last year co-organised Bonhams’ first sale dedicated to contemporary glass – 80 per cent of which sold. “Glass remains the little sister to ceramics but there are ardent collectors now and they are driving others’ interest. We’ve hosted events at which art collectors have bought glass when they would never have thought of doing so otherwise.”

‘Blue Void’ by Joanne Mitchell

Growth in the luxury market and a rising demand for the hand-crafted has also helped spur on sales of what, as a product of the labour and energy-intensive production process, are almost by definition expensive items. Glass brand giants such as Orrefors and Kosta Boda have sought to make their products appealing to a customer base more likely to associate them with dull crystal tableware. Last year, for example, Baccarat launched a collaboration with product designer Jaime Hayon, which, atypically for the company’s lines, has sold out, and this month sees the launch of a collaboration with fellow design star Marcel Wanders.

“That level of excitement and that fresh perspective are needed to get people into glass who might otherwise not, especially those younger consumers who might look to luxury brands as benchmarks for quality but also want to live in 2010,” says Baccarat’s marketing director Guillaume Gellusseau. “That’s something the big names in glassmaking are all the more aware of since design is everywhere around us now.”

Looking further back, the rise of glass art lies in overcoming more workaday difficulties too. Factory owners who had furnaces were reluctant to give production over to the making of artistic pieces in which there seemed to be little profit. With the development of small furnaces in the mid-1960s, however, pioneered chiefly by glass artist Harvey Littleton in the US, some artist-makers could begin to afford to make small runs, and likewise some art colleges were able to develop profitable glassmaking courses.

As Glastorm Studio designer Brodie Nairn explains: “The fact that the US in particular had no long tradition in glassmaking meant it didn’t see any boundaries in the art. Big European glassmaking companies, like Lalique and Murano, have always employed artists to develop pieces but mostly under the aesthetic of the factory, which has been largely traditional,” he says. In other words, studio glass is becoming fashionable now because it is a very young decorative art form and still in development. Though we’ve had glass for 2,000 years, the first and second generation masters of the art are still being discovered.”

For some people, however, the inherent fragility of glass and its unique play with light can be dissuasive to the purchase of big ticket items. Michelle Alger, home buyer for London’s Liberty store, has bought and struggled to sell limited edition Swarovski pieces, for example, “not only because it is hard to sell art glass outside of a specialist setting – it needs to be displayed in the right light – but also because it’s hard to convince people to make the move from the perception of glass as a practical material for the making of pretty but functional objects to art glass in the first place. Interest is growing, but it remains niche.”

Angel Monzon, creative director of Vessel, a gallery that pioneered specialism in studio glass in the UK when it opened a decade ago, argues “there is a need for greater knowledge of the craftsmanship in glass in order to distinguish between an art piece and something from Habitat”.

There are less obvious difficulties too. Access to smaller furnaces might have given rise to an experimentation that has fuelled interest among practitioners and collectors but the economics of these – recent rises in the price of gas, for example – continue to have an impact. In order to keep creativity at a peak, a furnace would typically be kept on stand-by but now more artists are forced to work in short, manic spells and switch it off between them, or concentrate on blowing glass quickly and simply and putting the art into time-consuming but less expensive grinding, shining, engraving and so-called “cold-cutting” techniques afterwards.

“That situation would have been unheard of not long ago,” says Monzon. “Really no other art form has to contend with the cost of materials and production in quite the same way as glassmaking. It makes it harder for small artists to start out working in glass and even among established artists, few are big enough to have their own furnace constantly on the go.”

He includes artists such as Philip Baldwin and Monica Guggisberg, whom Vessel represents and whose vases command prices topping £10,000, with glass sculptures at £20,000 – even in a medium that, he says, remains undervalued. That may provide an investment opportunity for some, for others more an opportunity to enjoy glass art’s particular spectacle in their own homes.

“Glass is a very ‘readable’ medium,” says glass art dealer Adrian Sassoon, who handles work of diverse styles by the likes of Colin Reed, Angela Jarman and Bruno Romanelli. “People who don’t otherwise collect anything are attracted to it for its sparkle, its luminescence, its preciousness, even by the reassurance that each piece has a convincing pedigree – the training and tools required are such that you can’t be an amateur glass artist. But a new group of glass artists is emerging, the first generation who have been able to train with excellent masters. There is much more dynamic work to come.”