New Designers 2012: Glass

ARTS THREAD looks at some highlights from glass in this week’s show.

Emma Hollins is a graduate from the University of Sunderland. By chance, Sunderland’s football stadium is called the Stadium of light and Emma’s works more than anything else embody that all too elusive quality. Light is something handles with consummate ease, providing the viewer with an endless range of subtle shifting perspectives.

Melissa J Vogel is a graduate from De Montfort University. She is a glass artist who uses a wide variety of techniques. She has been recently been reflecting on the vast number of water pollutants created by industry to satisfy the demands and excesses of consumer needs. Her current work displays a thoughtful and at the same time, curiously beautiful comment on this important environmental issue.

Sarah Louise Arrowsmith studied at Plymouth University but her roots are the Potteries, in Stoke on Trent where she was born. He considers her work to playful and provocative with an emotive narrative. The work is often quite disturbing in the way that pieces fragment and appear at times almost  unbearably fragile.

Elizabeth Anne Smith studied at Edinburgh College of Art. She makes bowls of pate de verre – paste of glass – which is kiln fired to 820 degrees centigrade. She also uses black powder in the process as well as shades of clear glass. The texture has an amazingly fragile look but once picked up, the bowls paradoxically feel almost indestructible.

Graduate of the University of Wolverhampton. Katherine Roden points out that her main inspiration is shadow, light and reflection, the way that the light can reflect to give the illusion of a bigger space. ‘The way I make my glass is to be used as a means of a reflective instrument for exterior or interior.  Some of her work has a strong sense of bold colours, often used to great effect considering the material and size of her objects.’

The glass works of Belinda Salmon Harding emerge from the rich tradition of 20th century British sculpture. Belinda has an unerring eye and her delicate constructions of bent glass offer a seemingly endless choice of viewpoints. A graduate of UCA Farnham, she points out that space is never empty. It exists all around us. Glass embodies and aesthetic and symbolic role. It can both reflect and absorb light.

Kelly Rooker studied at the University of Wolverhampton but her quite unmistakable sense of humour had to be there from the very start . She states her work  has developed through dance, movement, silhouettes and street art. Her glass shoes and glass feet are beautifully made and in spite of this, it is difficult to resist a smile looking at them.