Last Wednesday, two very original artists presented their work in the latest of a series of talks at the University of Sunderland:

"Straddling the Art & Craft Divide"
In the first presentation, Cate Blatherwick gave a candid insight into her personal and artistic life.  The daughter of renowned potter, Robert Blatherwick, Cate comes from a creative, if slightly unconventional, Lincolnshire family.  Her father trained at Wedgwood, Burslem and Winchcome (under Michael Cardew), then worked with pottery luminaries like Bernard Leach, Ray Finch and Lucy Rie.  Her mother was also an inspiration and influence.  As well as being creative herself, she raised three children, grew all her own veg (long before ‘The Good Life’ became the fashionable alternative), and had a strong social conscience, going on CND marches in the 1970s.  To hear Cate’s story, it seems this upbringing must have fostered something of a bohemian attitude and vague political awareness in her from the moment she could walk and talk!  At 19, she came to Newcastle to study painting but, on achieving her degree, decided art was quite a frivolous pastime and rather a luxury in a society where some people had nothing.  So she promptly turned her back on the creative world and spent the next 20 years developing her career in charitable and social organisations.  Finally, though, around 2009, she returned to her roots, embarking on a short ceramics course, before transferring to glass and undertaking an MA at Sunderland which she completed, with distinction, last year.  Her creative work is now about the realisation of ideas, where she is drawn to and inspired by expressions of what she calls “the human condition”.  She aims to capture how other people live their lives, sometimes private, hidden or secret, reflecting parts of society that we are not usually aware of.

"Animal as Narrative, Animal as Medium"
In complete contrast, the next talk was by June Kingsbury.  June lives near London and studied art in Buckinghamshire, completing her MA in 2006.  She studied ceramics before being seduced by the lure of glass, but couldn’t understand why you had to select one or the other as a discipline.  “They said you couldn’t combine ceramics with glass, and I thought why not?”, then set about creating hybrid pieces that pushed the boundaries.  After embarking on a project called ‘One Year, One Walk’ where she walked, collected and logged what she saw around the countryside, she inevitably encountered some of the casualties that occur when nature meets man, in the form of road kill.  So the next boundaries pushed were about how to capture the lives of these dead creatures in her art.  “When people die, they are mourned” she says.  “I wanted to make these things noticed, so they had some meaning.”  But she aimed to tell a story, not just display the object itself.  She became obsessed by trying to cast carcasses as pieces of glass art, only to succeed in cremating them in the kiln.  She experimented with road killed squirrels, a fox, even with pigs’ trotters, but to no avail.  Eventually, after much testing, persistence and help from a patient technician, she finally achieved her goal.  The carcass and fur burned away, the plaster mould held the net impression, and hot glass flowed in to take up the space, with stunning results.  In recent projects, she now applies her prowess to creatures the size of badgers.  June also incorporates letters and text into her work, posing her creations on books or captioning them with meaningful phrases.  June says her work is about absence and memory, creating a dialogue between past events and current issues.  I am interested to know whether her work concerning the dead is about commemoration or transformation: is it meant to celebrate a life, or turn it into an object of desire?  It may be both.  When her mother passed away, June cast her ashes into a number of small glass houses, which were then given to members of the family as keepsakes.  This suggests both an act of remembrance and the opportunity to immortalise the subject forever, a transformation into something beautiful and treasured. This artist and her creative output are certainly intriguing, and yet, however skilful, it is art that may not be to everyone’s taste.  I leave you to decide.

What do chocolates, lace, Hercules Poirot and a glass artist named Inge Panneels have in common?
In the first of a series of artists’ talks organised by Cate Watkinson, Senior Lecturer in Architectural Glass at the University of Sunderland, I soon discovered that they are all fine Belgian exports. Inge came to the UK in 1994 to study for a BA in Architectural Glass at Edinburgh College of Art - and never left! She now resides in the Scottish Borders, from where she runs IDAGOS, a contemporary glass studio and workshop business (www.idagos.co.uk). Inge is also a senior lecturer at Sunderland and one of the tutors on my BA Glass and Ceramics course.

In her talk, Inge described the main three strands of her practice: architectural, sculptural and giftware. Working with space and light as a preferred medium, her architectural and sculptural work involves bespoke or limited edition pieces. Projects often come about through open competition and include public art as well as work for private and corporate clients. One of her most recent high profile pieces was the ‘Liverpool Map’, an amazing collaboration with fellow artist and lecturer Jeffrey Sarmiento. The finished installation, which took nine months to produce, is now on display in the Museum of Liverpool. It is a series of six printed, fused water-jet cut panels, weighing in at a massive 600 kilos of glass. The huge map features well known Liverpool places and faces, with words and phrases supplied by local people. Her latest project, ‘Map as Metaphor’, also links to the theme of maps. It celebrates the work of another fellow Belgian, the 16th century cartographer Geradus Mercator (who created the famous Mercator Projection, the standard world map layout still in use today). Inge went on to describe how her projects are costed, the network of trusted suppliers used to complete a work and the way in which she seeks funding. In future, she suggested artists may have to generate more of their own projects rather than rely on a public intermediary for support. As an artist on the cusp of setting up my own professional practice, I found her talk greatly illuminating and helpful. I am looking forward to talks from other artists over the coming weeks, to help me build my knowledge and understanding of running my own studio.

Over the next few weeks, several more artists’ talks are scheduled. Free and open to all, they are held on Wednesdays from 4 pm to 6 pm at Lecture Theatre 007, Prospect Building, St Peter’s Campus, University of Sunderland, SR6 0DD.  Join us if you can.

I was watching a TV programme recently about how satellites have revolutionised communications in the last half a century. We have certainly come a long way since the days of Sputnik! It's not that many years since news items featured someone being interviewed by a live link that would fade out after about three minutes as Earth's trajectory and that of the satellite parted company. Today, a thousand bits of hi-tech space junk in geo-stationary orbit triangulate our place on the planet with pinpoint accuracy. There's nowhere to hide from the 24/7 global communication super highway. Instant messaging is the norm. Facebook, Twitter and other forms of online social and cultural media are now as natural as breathing. In this light, I have reluctantly accepted the need to join the "chattering classes" and start my own blog (although it may also be something to do with the three-line whip from my university tutors, who insist I do so for the sake of my degree!). So I'll be here, telling you about my life, studies and art on a regular basis from now on, and would welcome your feedback. My conversations may be mundane, hardly of national importance and unlikely to require international censorship, but should give you an insight into my world as a student and will hopefully be of interest to some! See you soon.