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Only a few decades ago, just being able to cast glass was enough to excite interest, and questions that involved deeper creative motives were somewhat overshadowed in the headlong search for novel ways of merely shaping the material. We are now a couple of generations down the line from those heady, exciting and naïve days, though most of the pioneers of the studio movement are, happily, still with us…
Now that the studio-glass movement is in its third generation, it is increasingly common for established artists to accept aspiring ones as studio assistants. This has a profound effect on those lucky enough to benefit from such an experience. It is a far cry from the early days, when very little information was available and the little that did exist had to be gained by constant experiment.
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Keith Cummings’ reflections on the now global phenomenon of the studio-glass movement in contemporary art, provide a useful introduction to A Thread of Light: Colin Reid and three generations of British kiln-cast glass. They assemble at first-hand and in active, living memory a generational perspective on the emergence of kiln-cast studio glass since the 1960s in a very British context.
Our second epigraph, from the British ‘land artist’ Richard Long, was his response to a question from the audience, “what, if anything, would you say is permanent in art?”, at a public conversation with fellow artist Chris Drury at Dartington (UK) in October 2005. Richard Long is here I think affirming the intangible power of cultural transmission, extension and renewal in philosophy and at the level of individual or collective art practise.
The artists gathered in this exhibition are in these terms closely linked across three generations of thinking and making in the medium of cast glass, in a particular place (the UK) at a certain point in time (over the last sixty years). With a series of three publications, Keith Cummings (b.1940) has established the technical, historical and contemporary dimensions of this movement, and of his own pioneering practise – exemplified in this Liuli China Museum show by Reflect (2017). Cummings’ work is both the original fuse or element and also a continuing source of illumination in this bright thread of vitreous light across three generations of British artists in kiln-cast glass. His quietly self-effacing influence since the 1960s and, significantly for studio glass artists in China since the 1990s, both through his studio practise and through his teaching, is of far-reaching historical significance.
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The artists represented in the current exhibition do not however comprise an aesthetic ‘movement’ in the formal sense of that term. They have no manifesto. There is no ‘house style’. The extraordinary diversity of their work traces the individual pathways they have followed. Even so they are working in an identifiable tradition, exemplified by their choice of materials and techniques, philosophy and lifestyle, in which the work is not easily distinguishable from the life, This observation is clearly evident in the sense that Keith Cummings traces it to the example of François Décorchemont:
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The route taken by today’s studio-glass artists, although foreshadowed by earlier practitioners like François Décorchemont [1880-1971], with their choice of art over craft, is not a straightforward one. The decision to devote oneself to the lifetime practice of a craft discipline in the 21st century is not the same as making that choice in a pre-industrial, or even an early post-industrial age… The choice of a life spent in the practice of a craft material discipline is a self-conscious one based on the desire for self-expression. You could say that such a choice determines the lifestyle; two centuries ago the reverse was true. The context in which such activities are studied are now the art school and the university rather than the atelier, workshop or factory.
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Within the global studio glass movement this British tradition distinguishes itself from American hot glass (with the development of small studio furnace technology), or the work Czech and French artists in glass factory contexts, as a growing community of practise in kiln-forming, stemming from Keith Cummings’ earliest experiments as a student at Durham University in the late 1950s and later at the Whitefriars Glass Company and at Stourbridge College of Art (later transferred to the University of Wolverhampton) and at the Royal College of Art in London. In the UK, the formative role of art schools and university departments has been decisive.
