Exhibition champions underestimated art form with a touch of glass

It’s a wonderfully refreshing and eye-opening show with deep connections to Scotland’s literature, politics and ecology and it’s a relatively neglected area of art creation that warrants recognition in its own right, alongside the more familiar genres of the visual and literary arts.

The exhibition is a deep enrichment of colour to the hungry eye as the autumn brings its rainbow greys. It’s an endorsement of the physicality of art, the fact that works of art are things that are made, crafted, shaped, and filled with a human vision. It’s also a reassurance that workers in the arts of all kinds, and in so many different media, are not alone.

A REMARKABLE international exhibition of work by contemporary glass artists, entitled “Stories: Whispers from the Past and the Present”, is being hosted in Inverness this month (until October 29) at the WASPS Creative Academy in Stephen Street.

It has travelled there after two weeks on show in Glasgow, at the magnificent Trades Hall in Glassford Street, where it was launched with the blessings of antiques expert and TV auctioneer Anita Manning.

It’s a bold new joint venture, organised by the Scottish Glass Society and the Contemporary Glass Society, whose sponsors range from Creative Scotland to the United Nations’s International Year of Glass. Its most splendid centrepiece is a large exhibit called “The Glass Quilt”, the product of an intensive collaboration by 50 Irish artists, curated by the Glass Society of Ireland.

Manning’s introductory speech drew attention to the underestimated aesthetic values of glass art, which deserves a much higher profile than it presently enjoys. She half-jokingly traced her own appreciation back to her early experience, during a fairly typical Glasgow childhood, of the glass marbles or “jorries”, whose swirling colours are mysteriously suspended inside the spheres, like images in a crystal ball.

There’s an impressive variety of craft techniques on display here, from traditional-looking stained glass and mouth-blown vessels, to the more abstract kiln-fired sculptures, but they exemplify the paradoxical blend of mystery and transparency that she identifies. The sense of natural fragility in the materials contributes to an enthralling effect of spontaneity, as if each exhibit were fresh from the hands of the artist.

The title and theme were prompted by Scotland’s 2022 Year of Stories, devised as a stimulus to all sorts of narrative creativity. This is reflected in the diversity of subject matter, from personal and local stories to literary figures such as Burns, and it inspires the most abstract works as well as the most literal.

Michael Bullen’s ship-shaped sculpture “Hamnavoe” bears several lines of the George Mackay Brown poem of that name – “words,” as he says, in a note to the handsome catalogue, “that help me navigate and enjoy life’s journey.”

A somewhat darker story is evoked by Fiona MacLean’s tombstone-like “Clach an Airm” (“Stone of Arms”), a full-scale glass model of the upright stone slab used by the McGillivray clan to sharpen their weapons on April 15, 1746, in preparation for the fatal Battle of Culloden. “It shows two sides of history,” she points out, “the rough side, and the smooth romantic side.”

Ships and the sea are clearly a constant source of inspiration. The tragic Scots ballad of “Sir Patrick Spens”, where a royal bride-to-be drowns on a voyage from Norway, has fired the imagination of artist/musician Alison Kinnaird MBE, whose sombre wall-panel features the “auld moon/with the new moon in her arms”.

Susan Purser Hope’s colourful fused-glass collage “Nova Zembla, Setting Sail” is a dramatic commemoration of a Dundee whaling ship, destroyed in Baffin Bay in 1902.

Nova Zembla – Setting Sail, Susan Purser Hope (Image: Susan Purser Hope)

Anthony McCabe takes a more ambitious conceptual approach to Glasgow’s shipbuilding industry in his richly coloured “Red Metal Work”, a transparent urn-shaped sculpture where threads of metal and old military shell-casings are embedded. The swirls of orange-red enamel suggest shipyard furnaces and casualties of violence, and perhaps even the supposed origins of glassmaking in alchemy, as a mystical union of fire and earth.

Anthony McCabe’s Red Metal Work (Image: Anthony McCabe)

The natural world provides the most dominant theme, particularly as a response to the glories of the Scottish landscape. The narrative framework sometimes looks artificial, in this context, but the variety of technical effects is most striking, and it is easy to observe how readily the materials of the craft can adopt organic patterns.

The Rockpool by Phillipa Silcock (Image: Phillipa Silcock)

Birds and fish and rockpools and assorted fauna confront us on all sides and one of the most evocative pieces is Fiona Fawcett’s deceptively simple “Sea Cliff, Duncansby Head”, whose subtly graded ridges of blue suggest layers of guano as well as the sea waves off Caithness and the increasing threat of erosion. Wendy Newhofer’s “Solitary Tree” celebrates the obstinate resilience of a lonely oak, at Milarrochy Bay on Loch Lomond, which “clings to life tenaciously,” as she explains, “in spite of being frequently submerged beneath the water.”

Environmental concerns are evident also in Sarah Wilkinson’s “Snow Patches”, whose delicate lace-like beauty doesn’t conceal its message of alarm, at the effects of climate change.

Another cautionary tale is offered by Siobhan Healy’s “The Path of Self-Destruction”, a translucent image of undersea organisms on the Pacific Ocean-bed. She tells us that they are based on Venus Flower Baskets (Euplectella Aspergillum), “glass sponges” that entrap a species of shrimp and kill only the breeding pairs, as if they were a device to prevent over-population. Threatened botanical species are one of this sculptor’s special interests, and another vivid example is her “Ghost Orchids” (2012), now on display at the Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh.

HEALY is one of the curators and sponsors of the exhibition, through her Argyll-based centre Healy Arts, whose new studio on the Craignish Peninsula looks like an architectural art-work in itself. Among the admirers and patrons of her work have been David Attenborough and the late Alasdair Gray, a family friend who encouraged her drawing as a child in Glasgow.

Hortus Conclusus by Angela Thwaites (Image: Angela Thwaites)

She is at pains to stress the importance of hands-on manual work that “maintains physical contact with the real world” and her catalogue-note deplores the growing tendency of universities and colleges “to cancel material-based courses in favour of designing on computers”.

A characteristic recent project was “A Radical Act of Love”, an “installation” influenced by the German artist Joseph Beuys, realised during the first Covid lockdown and supported by Beuys’s old friend Richard Demarco, who is still reassuringly active at the age of 92. It entailed the planting of 1000 oak saplings in various parts of Scotland, at the expense of a UK Government which had offered them as a meagre compensation for the destruction wrought by the rail project HS2.

It was largely Healy’s initiative that brought “The Glass Quilt” over from Ireland, together with several of the artists in person, and its composition represents a cheering story of mutual artistic benefit. Ninety-six rhomboid-shaped glass tiles, suspended in a fine brass mesh that allows full visibility, are arranged to look like a patchwork quilt – a homely image, that nicely expresses the cross-fertilisation of talents.

Conceived and executed during a 12-week pandemic lockdown, the project brought many of the artists out of unproductive states of isolation, and their responses to the invitation could hardly be more diverse. The result is a compendium of luminous images, reflecting nearly every possible technique, where Ireland has been discreetly reunited by including Ulster as one of its four ancient provinces. It’s no surprise to learn that, before coming to Scotland, it was selected by an international jury for Venice Glass Week and exhibited at Dublin Castle for a recent conference of the World Craft Council.

“The Glass Quilt” attracted the support of the Irish Health Service’s Keep Well campaign and it stands as an eloquent testimony to the therapeutic powers of arts and crafts. Pointing to her own contribution, showing the engraved head of a galloping horse with flying white mane, artist Emer O’Donnell told me that her participation had been a “lifesaver”: “The wild horse was my image of freedom, but it meant a lot to me that I wasn’t alone.”

The exhibition illuminates many little-known aspects of glass art, and it has clearly reinforced the bonds of an artistic community, on all sides of the Irish Sea.