Glass half full: The beautifully fragile artform that has taken the world by storm

It's most unusual for a piece of art to be name-checked, never mind be regularly on display in a sitcom, yet Dale Chihuly’s blown-glass sculpture Macchia, worth some $30,000, had pride of place in Frasier, from season six onwards. In one scene, the titular character’s father emptied his pockets into it, causing Frasier to protest: ‘My Chihuly is not a trash can!’

Indeed not: Chihuly was one of the founders of the contemporary studio glass movement in the US and his influence has been profound in the UK. He has helped define the concept that studio glass is the use of the material to make art, rather than vessels produced in factories, and, with teams of blowers creating his designs in his huge hotshop (a series of furnaces), he has shifted the practice from solitary craftsmanship to a collaborative team-based model.

With his pieces featured in more than 200 museums, including the massive installation suspended in the entrance of the V&A Museum, Chihuly transformed traditional craft into a recognised medium of monumental fine art.

Although some artists originally created ‘art vessels’ with a practical function, such as vases or dishes, glass has increasingly been employed to make sculptural objects, the function of which is to be beautiful or thought-provoking, rather than utilitarian.

‘Sometimes, a piece has an opening you could put a handful of flowers or twigs in, but no, studio art glass is not primarily a vase,’ explains Angel Monzon, owner and founder of the Vessel Gallery.

‘It’s the expression. It’s the form, it’s sometimes the storytelling, or the sheer beauty of it, or the skilled craft that goes into it. That can be a challenge for our market here… when it comes to glass, it’s still associated with a vase. Glass art is for an audience that appreciates sculpture.’

Until the 1950s, artists had little hands-on experience of glass. Then, art schools — led by Helen Monro Turner at Edinburgh College of Art and Ronald Stennett-Wilson at the Royal College of Art — began to install their own furnaces and offer their students the opportunity to blow their own glass. Students no longer created designs from a distance, but began to manipulate it to express their ideas.

‘To understand glass fundamentally, you have to engage in it,’ explains Sarah Rothwell, senior curator of Modern and Contemporary Design and glass specialist at the National Museum of Scotland. ‘You have to allow a student to work with it, to understand its possibilities and potential. That’s what was happening during the 1950s and early 1960s. It was the breaking down of those static barriers and allowing students to engage with material.’

Glass-blowing gathered pace with the arrival in the UK of Sam Herman, a Fulbright scholar and formidable self-publicist, who had trained with two pioneers of the art in the US, Harvey Littleton (who, in turn, helped train Chihuly) and Dominick Labino.

Blowing is a very physical activity and involves gathering a blob of molten glass on a blow pipe, shaping it and laying it in frit (coloured crushed glass) to colour it, before gathering more clear glass and heating in the kiln.

Although Herman was not the originator of British studio glass, he promoted it, going on to found The Glassworks, a studio and then gallery in Covent Garden that became extremely influential. A number of ceramicists also began experimenting with glass, the foremost being Peter Layton, whose London Glassblowing studio and gallery is celebrating 50 years this summer.

Layton, 90 next year, is still practising, creating organic works that swirl with colour and pattern. When teaching in the US, he built his own kiln. ‘I burnt myself very badly experimenting, so I was almost out of it as soon as I began,’ he recalls. ‘But glass gets you hooked. It’s addictive.’

Returning to the UK, he set up his own hot-shop in 1976 and, exhilarated by the Working with Hot Glass symposium at the Royal College of Art, commenced his extremely influential career. He worked mostly with colour, including iridescent glass.

‘The lovely thing about iridising was that it gave the glass a wonderfully silky surface. I wanted people to be able to handle glass. It was very tactile and didn’t finger-mark.’

Layton is known for his painterly marks on organic-shaped glass vessels, often inspired by projects with the Royal Academy and National Gallery. His workshop with a ‘nice little gallery attached’ has expanded, providing not only him with a place to develop his own pieces, but also a host of glass-makers, who, in return for working part time for him, use the facilities for their own projects.

Until the 1980s, ‘there was,’ according to Rothwell, ‘a rather macho culture of the glass blower with a very performative hotshop culture, with a focus on process and virtuosity and how bright and vivid the colour.’ At the time, men got all the action, but by the late 1970s and through the next decade, glass artists explored new directions, taking on board the influence of cast glass from the then Czecho-slovakia.

Rather than amorphous, coloured blown vessels, they created sculptural, architectural, often monolithic forms. Some, such as Harry Seager and Danny Lane, worked with cut and glued float glass to create architectural glass, with artists Keith Cummings and Colin Reid developing kiln casting.

Reid takes moulds from books, string instruments and plants to cast in glass to create his sculptures, but today concentrates more on casting from rocks. ‘Glass has qualities that other materials don’t have. You’ve got the outer form of it, but also the inner space, which gives you another whole dimension.

'Casting is an incredibly powerful technique. It gives the possibility to incorporate found objects, found forms and textures into a completely new piece.’ Today, he is also starting to work with a robotic arm to create his sculptures.

By the late 1980s, glass began to be used by artists, especially women, to tell stories and make social commentary, particularly about gender. At the time, collectors and critics were more interested in technique and bravura than ideas, so female makers often lacked galleries, advocates or institutional support. That began to change in the following decade, with artists becoming much more conceptually ambitious, exploring storytelling and issues of identity and ecology, as well as pushing for glass art to be recognised as fine art.

Cast-glass artist Anna Dickinson was a pioneer, as was Emma Woffenden, who creates blown and slumped sculptural works, incorporating other media, to explore the psychological, the human form and social narratives in large-scale body-like sculptures.

‘I was always looking for a language, because I wasn’t very good at expressing myself, so I put it all into the work. It was that thing of finding this language of form,’ she explains.

Glass has also given artist Chris Day his own voice, providing a language to express his personal history. Originally a plumber, he blows the material into copper cages. His work now explores themes of identity, social justice, historical narratives and the impact of colonialism.

‘My new pieces of work are definitely talking about me, finding out about my Jamaican background, my Nigerian heritage. It’s a way of telling people about my identity and being proud for once. For years, I’ve been ashamed of who I am. My work, although about my own identity, ties into historical facts as well.’

Day, as have many others, has been helped by Monzon and his Vessel Gallery, which has cultivated collectors of British glass and has been enormously successful in attracting foreign buyers.

‘We have a great, great movement in cast glass at the moment in this country — for example, Monette Larsen and Nina Casson McGarva are doing some exceptional cast work. Nina uses the approach of blown glass, where you manipulate with your hands and you shape it. She casts glass and then goes in kitted out like an astronaut, with heat-resistant gear and dives into the kiln and manipulates it. She has a minute and a half to form her pieces.’

Other glass artists such as Elliot Walker create sculpture of furniture and objects, not by casting, but by modelling cooling liquid glass. ‘The process of coaxing a complex form out of the liquid glass is unlike working with any other material. Until the very last second, the sculpture is a moving living entity, frozen in time as the glass sets.’

Rather more minimalist is the work of Karlyn Sutherland, who explores place, light and shadow in her architectural glass. Yet glass is expensive to make, especially as the UK has such high energy prices. Today, courses are proving too costly to run and galleries and museums are cautious about showing glass. Britain is such a leader in studio glass: it would be tragic if it was squeezed out of the market.

The International Festival of Glass, including The British Glass Biennale, takes place at The World of Glass, St Helens, Merseyside, from August 27–31.