In the third and final week of our Professional Practice Development (PPD) presentations, another five of my fellow students described their backgrounds, motivations and inspirations to the group.  The experience of giving these talks to each other has been very illuminating and has helped us bond further as a group.

Sophie Rushton:  At school, Sophie had wanted to study graphics, but then half way through her ‘A’ levels, she decided to up sticks and go travelling to New Zealand and Australia.  She had a wonderful time here and her artistic talents found a creative outlet when she discovered Paua shells.  Paua is the Maori name for a large edible sea snail that has a beautiful iridescent blue/green inner shell. She learned how to make jewellery from these shells and successfully sold the pieces she made. From the Antipodes, she travelled back to Europe and onto Spain.  Here, she lived for a while in a camper van and sold jewellery for a living.  Travelling through Spain, she also found herself working at a Summer Camp for a couple of years, teaching English to students as a second language.  In 2010, she enrolled on an Art Foundation course at Newcastle College, before embarking on her Glass and Ceramics degree.  She is interested in fashion and ceramics inspired by travel, and the interplay between nature and technology.

Charlotte Cooper: Charlie’s mum was keen for her to study for a career in health and social care, but Charlie had other ideas.  From Stoke-on-Trent, the heart of The Potteries, she had wanted to study art since the age of about nine.  Unbeknownst to mum, she rebelled and took art instead of the more academic course and followed this up with a BTEC National Diploma qualification at Newcastle-Under-Lyme in 2009. A proud achievement was to come within the top 1% of Staffordshire students for Art and Design. With the target of a new project every four weeks, she soon found herself interested in photography and ceramics, and soon decided to concentrate on the latter.  After college, she decided apply for a place on the Glass and Ceramics degree course. She wrote a goodbye card to her family, packed a bag and headed for Sunderland.  Inspired by artists like Henry Moore and Gordon Baldwin, she is now developing more sculptural pieces.

Stephanie da Silva: With dual Portuguese and English nationality, Steph admits to a flamboyant Latin side, alongside a more reserved British one. As a child, she studied classical ballet for nine years - then traded in her ballet shoes for a pair of Doc Martens and became a punk! At school, her best grades were in Art but, after leaving school, she opted to study precision engineering and CNC programming at college. Two years later, she decided this route probably wasn’t for her and started to look again towards a future in art.  Interested in photography, she got involved through friends in with the National Film & TV school, doing some set design and stills photography for a film.  By 2010, she had a portfolio of voluntary work, including experimenting with wood carving as a hobby. Then, in 2010, she decided on an Applied Art and Design course at Bournemouth, where she encountered metals, ceramics and glass, a material that excited her.  When the Bournemouth course closed, she came to Sunderland to complete her degree.

Patrick Smith: Patrick has always enjoyed a number of sporting activities and feels he is very competitive.  His more physical pursuits, when he was younger, included fencing, jujitsu, karate and mountaineering. At high school, he also got interested in the more sedate activity of ceramics, and a love affair with clay was started which he carried on into an art course at Newcastle University.  He enjoys the practical aspects of pottery, for example hand-building pieces and trying different firing techniques, like wood-firing.  He has found himself influenced by the systematic representation of patterns and forms, and by fractal images in nature. What he particularly likes is finding ways of getting the surface of the vessel to appear to be moving, through repetitive design.  Patrick says he has a passion for teaching and wants to consider this as a career option in the future.

Jackie Metcalf:  Born in South Africa in 1973, Jackie moved to the UK eleven years ago with a young family. She has six children in all, her eldest daughter now 21, and the youngest just 16 months.  Her children are her focus, her mainstay and her inspiration.  She is also inspired by her own childhood memories, and remembers growing up in South Africa with all the sights, sounds, traditions, flora and fauna of that country seared into her soul. Her father bred exotic birds and she has been used to handling them all her life.  She also has vivid childhood memories of an encounter with a green mamba snake, whose influence later found its way into a piece of her artwork.  She applied to do a psychology course, but became pregnant during her foundation year, so switched to art, which suited her family’s lifestyle better.  Specialising in ceramics and stained glass, she loves the activity of ‘craft’ and wants to get people to view it in a different, more positive light, not just as a poor relation of art.  She enjoys using a hands-on approach to make things, using textiles, quilting and beading in her work and has recently been working on an autobiographical piece, based on traditional Zulu beading and its meanings.  Her axiom is “I aspire neither to be rich nor famous, but to be doing something I love.”

In the second of our Professional Practice Development (PPD) sessions, another five of my fellow students presented their backgrounds, motivations and inspirations to the group.

Eduard Ruane:  Ed learned about glass through his family’s lamp-working and bead-making business.  In 2009, he studied International Business and Italian at the Dublin Institute of Technology but left to pursue more creative talents in 2010, with a one-year glass design course at Glasfachschule Zwiesel and a three-month internship at Bildwerk Frauenau in Germany.  He was selected as an exhibitor for the RDS Craft Exhibition in 2011 and began his degree studies at Sunderland the same year.  In 2012, he had the opportunity to go to Lagos, Nigeria, to help with the restoration of a cathedral window.  Despite having such a strong glass background, an interest in mechanics, engineering and practical technology has fuelled his research into a novel technique for screen-printed ceramic tile production, which he hopes to patent.

Jade Tapson:  Jade admits she was a bit of a tomboy growing up, but her main interests have always been textiles, fashion and animals.  She loves to draw.  At college, she dabbled in photography and was attracted to a fashion course, motivated by the innovation of designers like Jean-Paul Gaultier.  However, she prefers to ‘make’ even more than to draw, and realised the course would not be hands-on enough for her.  It’s not surprising then that she turned to the more practical subjects of glass and ceramics, inspired by artists like Claudi Casanovas.  In her foundation studies, she developed her style for controlled, restrained, clean-cut, precise work - and the perfectionist in her was born!  In her current degree piece, she is looking to put ‘fashion’ back into her work and create a hybrid costume made of glass and fabric.

Steph Sykes:  Steph hails from Leicester and learned the basics of glass blowing at De Montfort University.  Steph’s no stranger to colour, and uses it confidently in her work.  Her final piece for ‘A’ level was a brightly coloured flamingo, which she painted…without the use of a paintbrush! In fact, she’s really happiest when she has, say, a glue gun, in her hand and likes using a variety of materials to express her ideas.  She’s been very inspired by the colour, detail and exuberance of classic works by Tiffany as well as more contemporary artists like Andy Goldsworthy and Anna Mlasowsky.  In 2012, Steph did a month’s internship at North Tyneside Art Studios, where she learned to make bracelets and has been busy making and selling them ever since.  Recent glass pieces included a series of glass eggs, inspired by the sea birds at Marsden Rock.

Rebekah Jackson:  Rebekah is keen to travel.  When she has been abroad in the past, she has really enjoyed seeing the art of other countries and would love to experience more of this.  A trip to France, for instance, gave her the opportunity of visiting Notre Dame Cathedral, and she was entranced by its stained glass windows.  Art history interests her and she loves the Glasgow Style.  Her own artistic style is all about detail….and, she says, messiness!  She cites nature as a big influence in her work and loves using Indian ink to draw intricate, detailed natural forms, like the skeletal shapes of autumn leaves.  One of her inspirations is the artist Emma Williams, who has a cheerful, naïve, natural style.  She recently made contact with her via Facebook and now follows her site.

Susan Ratliff:  Susan’s father was a coal miner with a strong work ethic.  He ensured Susan had a good education and she grew up with a love of reading, communication and a genuine interest in and empathy with people.  She became a teacher, a profession she adored, particularly in the area of special educational needs.  Over the years, she has also done a lot of volunteer work and strongly recommends this path to her fellow students, as a way of gaining and giving something to society.  Although in her mid-fifties, Susan still has the capacity to get excited by life and is loving the experience of studying for a degree, a process which she feels has brought her opportunity, inspiration, development and support.  Her art is influenced by nature and architecture, and she finds she is looking at things with more attention now than ever before.  She wants to work in glass, and enjoys collaborative pieces.

As part of our Professional Practice Development (PPD), my Level 2 year group recently gave a series of presentations about ourselves over a three-week period.  It was very interesting to unearth facts about each other that we wouldn’t normally get to learn about in the general busy scheme of things - hearing, for example, that one of us had trained for nine years in classical ballet, and that another had lived for a while in a camper van in Spain.  The presentations also helped to define, for our lecturers, what our inspirations, aspirations and artistic direction might be in the future.  In the next few blog posts, I’ll be giving a quick sketch of each of my fellow students.  Who knows, some of them could become famous artists one day, and you’ll be able to say you read about them here first!  First up to present was me.  But I won’t repeat my life story here - you can read enough about me in other pages of this website... Here are the five others who presented with me on the 6th March.

Amie Rowswell:  Age 20, Amie lives at Whitley Bay, a place where the sand and sea continually inspire her creative work.  At school, Amie had planned to study for a biomedical science degree, but at the last minute made a radical switch to art (another favourite subject).  But even now, she still looks to nature and biology for her subject matter.  Her passions are cats and horses, which she loves to paint and draw - and also running, which she trains for relentlessly (she is doing the BUPA Great North Run this year).  Right now, she’s experimenting with different glass forms and techniques, looking to find her signature style.

James Douglass:  After getting an ‘A’ level in Art at Heaton Manor, James went backpacking around Western Europe for six weeks.  He then did a diploma in Art & Design at Newcastle College, experimenting with photography, then eventually specialising, and achieving a distinction, in Ceramics.  Now doing his BA, he is refining his ceramic technique, improving kiln packing and firing, and trying out Japanese methods such as Hakeme (white slip applied freely with a brush) and chattering (where a metal tool is used to make regular impressions on the clay surface).  He is also experimenting with slow-firing over two to three weeks; as well as crackle glazes, gold leaf and lustres.  His goal is to apply for PGCE training, then gain employment as a technician.

Laura Carter:  Dog-lover Laura once wanted to be a vet but did some work in a practice and changed her mind.  She went to college in 2001 to study Art and English.  After a number of career changes, and periods of life coping with depression, she eventually turned to this degree course to help her find a new way.  She likes to use found objects in her work.  During her foundation course, she created ‘The Gentleman’s Crafting Club’ - an installation and performance piece; and, later, ‘The Art of Collection’ - a curiosity cabinet, whose contents could be swapped with people all over the world.

Amber King:  Fiercely independent, Amber moved away from home at 16 and has lived on her own ever since.  She spent a period of time camping, backpacking and living outdoors - with her valuables stuffed in her socks!  Now aged 23, she is still enjoying the challenge of learning something new.  Through studying for a BA, she wants to enhance her life experience, express herself more creatively and get a career underway.  Her work has evolved from an interest in natural forms to towards integrating science and technology into her art, currently by exploring the unseen world of data visualisation.

Emma Baker:  As a child, Emma was a real ‘tomboy’, enjoying sports and snowboarding.  But injuries - and a fractured coccyx - put paid to thoughts of a career in sports and instead she turned to art for self-expression. She says she felt she flunked college, even though she gained 2 ‘A’ levels.  After college, she went to work in an architect’s office, doing admin and CAD design, but couldn’t settle.  Eventually, she decided on a foundation course in Applied Art & Design at Bournemouth University.  A two-week placement with glassblower Catherine Wade from Gate Gallery Glassworks, Brecon, Wales, inspired her as a glass artist and, when Bournemouth’s glass course closed last year, she opted to move to Sunderland to continue her BA studies.

On 20th February, Anna Mlasowsky delivered a presentation in the latest of the series of Artists' Talks at Sunderland University. Anna is a 28 year old, German-born artist who graduated from the Danish Design School, in Bornholm, Denmark in 2011. During her degree studies, she had study exchanges in Finland, Sweden and Japan and scholarships in the USA. Initially, her glass blowing expressed aspects of the human body, then, in 2009, she created a ‘stop-motion’ film piece about her family roots, entitled 'Heritage 2009'. Inspired by her Grandmother’s spinning wheel and family traditions, the film shows Anna using the wheel to spin molten glass ‘thread’ onto bobbins. Anna observes that glass tools haven’t changed much for centuries, but what we can achieve with them has. So her work has taken her on a journey of exploration about pushing the boundaries of what can be achieved. ‘X-Ray 2010’ is about glass objects that have been blown and then scanned, to produce interesting negative and positive shapes. In ‘Tension 2010’ she explores how different glasses are not always compatible, and sets about combining two which aren’t - yet don’t break - into a series of objects which can be viewed through Polaroid lenses, revealing a myriad of stress interference colours. Stress in glass is normally something to be avoided. Instead, Anna embraces and controls it in her work. As time went on, she became increasingly puzzled by the term ‘hand-made’ glass. Her definition is that most hand-made glass is actually ‘tool- made’. She wondered what would happen if something were truly ‘hand-made’. She heated window glass and, with asbestos mittens, manipulated and contorted it into intriguing shapes, like folds in material. In ‘Circular Motion’ - a piece now in Germany’s Museum of Glass Art - she blew bubbles, then tried to get them off centre and collapsed them, in a controlled way, resulting in beautiful shapes. Anna admits to being quite a solitary person and often travels and lives alone. She realised that she was mostly communicating with family and friends via the internet and Skype, which she felt largely reduced her to a head-and-shoulders pixel portrait. This led to her producing a stop-motion piece called ‘3429 Images’ in which these portraits montage into a noisy, intimate, 24/7 slice of her life. She followed this with ‘From Eye To Ear 2011’, where she pressed her face against pieces of glass, making them dirty with fingerprints, skin, natural oils which she then fires in. In this blurry self-portrait, she examines her role as a remote, pixellated, technology-driven individual.

This led to ‘Silence 2011’, a cool, calm, contemplative work, incorporating blown and sandblasted vessels, and images of fog. She finds fog appealing, because of its density and ability to deaden sound. She largely works with clear glass and a monochrome palette, which lends itself well to her subject matter.  ‘Still Life 2011’ was inspired by the influence of the elements on materials and the Fukushima disaster (when an earthquake and tsunami produced a seismic shift in Japan’s tectonic plates). ‘Synergy 2011’ uses fused glass powders and enamels to create small panels that evoke ideas of earth, environment and erosion. In these works, Anna reflects on the impact of nature and how we are often powerless to influence or change it.  “I’m not a creator any more, I’m an observer” she says. “I just arrange the parts.” Control is Anna’s watchword. In works like ‘Point of Inflection’, she uses sheets of broken glass, to show how the controlled application of force influences the way that glass breaks. Again, she was told that you couldn’t really use the ‘broken bits’, but she chooses to, claiming that “deliberately breaking the glass in a controlled way opens up new possibilities.” She makes moulds from Styrofoam, fibreglass and resins used in the aerospace industry on which to slump and form glass. By layering glass shards and colouring the edges, outlines become like lines in an original drawing; broken mirrors reflect the environment and create a new one. In ‘Sound Visions 2011’, Anna explores the way sound can be turned into movement, then shapes. Sound vibrations agitate glass powder sprinkled on special kiln paper. These are then fired, to create delicate patterns reminiscent of water and waves. She is now doing further exploration into sound and silence, creating fused glass powder ‘sound structures’. After her talk, Anna demonstrated some of her techniques to us in a short workshop, revealing a simple but effective approach that suggests she sets out not to ask the question “why”, but more often “why not?”

Anna recently had a solo show at the Ebeltoft Glass Museum, Denmark and is currently working on a show in Sweden. Her work is already in German, Danish, Japanese and American collections. She seems happy to continue to break all the rules, to create original installations with meaningful narrative, and her reputation as a glass artist of international standing is growing. She is definitely one to watch.

Helen Whittaker is an award-winning designer and maker of stained glass windows and architectural sculptures in glass and copper.  She uses figurative glass painting and traditional glazing techniques combined with geometric designs and abstract forms.  She gained a BA (Hons) from Sunderland in three-dimensional design in Glass and Ceramics, then an MA in Visual, Islamic and Traditional Arts from the Prince of Wales Institute for Architecture.  She is also an Associate of the British Society of Master Glass Painters, a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Glaziers and a Craft Scholar of the Prince’s Foundation.  Helen has won several awards including the Hancock Medal for High Achievement and a commission through the Stevens Competition run by the Worshipful Company of Glaziers and Painters of Glass.  As well as managing her own portfolio, she has been associated with York’s prestigious Barley Studio since 1998.  The studio is well known for stained glass creation, conservation and restoration.  In Helen’s talk to us on the 6th February, she described many of her past achievements as well as current and future projects.  But, most meaningfully, she shared 7 important tips from her practice for us to consider:
 
1.  History of the building
2.  Architectural space selected for the windows
3.  Relationship between the window and those who use the building
4.  Light and the aspect of the window within the building
5.  Purpose of the window within the building
6.  Structural limitations
7.  Relationship between the window and other works of art

Relating specific briefs, she then presented examples of work that demonstrated each area of advice.  She explained, for example, how considering the history of the building had been important in tackling 14 windows, each 6’ high, in the Lady Chapel, Ely Cathedral.  The use of lilies and circular patterns had helped to recreate a 14th century look.  In St Peter & Mary’s Church, Stowmarket, she looked at the architectural space that had been selected for the windows.  The sequence of four seasons, depicting Spring/Water; Summer/Fire; Autumn/Earth and Winter/Air was positioned to balance and complement the window dimensions and architectural design.  In creating a commemorative window for the Andrews family in St James’ Chapel, Highgate Cemetery, Helen had to consider the relationship between the chapel and three generations of the family, who had lived in Highgate village for over a hundred years.  A commission for the RAF Club in 2008 required thinking about the aspect of the window within the building and aiming to get the window to come alive as much as possible without much natural lighting.  The windows were quite dark, so Helen relied on gilding and metallic work as well as diagonal design to lift the eye, to focus on key content such as the RAF motto and emblem.  Other equally important factors involved looking at the purpose of a window within a building (such as the one at Holme Cultram Abbey in 2012, which commemorates the lives of a brother and sister killed in a car crash); as well as a window’s structural attributes and limitations (such as at St Ethelburga’s Centre, London, almost destroyed by an IRA bomb and then reconstructed: Helen’s figure of St Ethelburga is seen moving through the window, uniting shards of flying glass in a gesture of harmony and hope).  Finally, Helen advised that the relationship of the window with other works of art already in the building also has to be a prime consideration.  When creating sculptural pieces for Beverley Minster’s Retro-Quire and working on The Pilgrim Window, in 2004, Helen had to be conscious of the minster’s long architectural and artistic tradition, in the Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular Style.  An intricately carved screen was designed by a famed Victorian architect, Sir George Gilbert Scott, and carved by James Elwell.  Helen’s response was to use a more abstract approach, different from her usual figurative style yet sympathetic to the existing artwork.

Despite her usual ecclesiastical subject matter, Helen describes herself as spiritual, but not a specifically religious person.  She says her subjects help her raise her aspirations as well as consciousness.  Much of Helen’s work is done in collaboration with other practitioners, be they stained glass artists, architects or technicians.  Her talk imparted plenty of practical advice, but she finished by inviting us follow three more rules that she tries to live by: 1) enjoy what you do; 2) don’t be subject to fashion; and 3) always follow your heart.  Wise words from a master of her art!

On the same evening, we heard from Kate Jones of Gillies Jones, a glass practice based at Rosedale Abbey, on the North York moors. Kate and her partner Stephen Gillies operate from a studio in the village, making artwork to their own design, by hand. Stephen is the glassmaker, using a highly skilful Swedish technique known as 'overlay', whilst Kate has adapted her visual skills from fine art to glass. Kate designs the artwork, decorating pieces by sand-blasting and, more recently, a diamond lathe. Kate grew up on a council estate in London so, for her, there is a special enchantment in living in the rural isolation of the North York Moors, where each farmer’s field can tell its own story: a story that you can see depicted in their work. They have a clear idea of how they want the finished glass to look and use what they describe as a ‘defiantly decorative’ style, employing bright colours and graphic patterns. Their work can be found in both major collections around the world, including the V&A, Ebeltoft Glass Museum and Dan Klein and Alan Poole’s private collection. They also lecture and are part of the Walpole Crafted mentorship programme, a series of educational workshops aimed at helping crafts businesses to develop their entrepreneurial skills and target the British luxury industry. With Arts Council funding, their studio has played host to visiting glass masters such as Tobias Mohl in 1998 and Janusz Pozniak in 2003. Pozniak gave a series of demonstrations entitled “Rubare con gli occhi” or “Steal With Your Eyes”. This title derives from the Venetian glass tradition, when the master at his work would not advise, teach or even speak to the apprentice. Instead, it was incumbent upon the pupil to watch, learn and practice in their own time. In effect, they had to ‘steal’ the skill with their eyes, then make it their own with their hands.

Kate gave us a brief history of their own ‘apprenticeships’ in glass. Stephen started by training at Stourbridge College of Art, then at Wolverhampton University. He worked for a while in the Ebeltoft Glass Museum, Denmark and with Philip Baldwin and Monica Guggisberg in Switzerland. His glass apprenticeship led to studying and working with masters such as Dale Chihuly, Lino Tagliapietra, Josiah McElheney, Jan Erik Ritzman and Richard Marquis, making Stephen the craftsman he is today.  Kate trained in painting, then moved to glass design and decoration at the International Glass Centre, Brierley Hill, Dudley. She later travelled to India with the British Council on a research project.  She brings a sense of subtle pattern and design to their work, especially in graphic decoration.

Since 1994, Kate and Stephen have worked in partnership, in both life and business. Their ‘signature’ piece is a beautiful vessel form, based on the horse chestnut seed-pod, which they call “Aesculus”. Their style is all about proportion, form, design, cutting and movement. From their small studio, they produce world-acclaimed, award-winning work, for galleries, collections and commissions, but also run small workshops and hold two studio exhibitions a year in the main gallery. Recently, they have made pieces for an exhibition for the North York Moors National Park, and the beauty, romance and remoteness of their rural location was key in informing their work.  Concluding her talk, Kate had plenty of advice for us too. In some ways, she said, you need more tenacity than you do talent: her message was for us to keep ploughing our furrow and keep our integrity intact. “If a gallery says no, always try again; never accept rejection”, she urged. I promise to always follow that advice!

Claire Todd: "The compulsion to make"
In the first of two artists’ talks last Wednesday, we met sculptor and scenographer Claire Todd, whose work combines elements of sculpture, performance, film, costume, drawing and print.  Following a BA in Fine Art Sculpture at Northumbria University (1994) and an MA in Scenography at St Martins, London (1995), Claire graduated in 1999 from the Rijksakademie Van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam.  Artist residencies have taken her around England, Aberdeenshire, Prague, Rome and Arizona.  She has also exhibited widely too, in Holland, Belgium and Germany.  Claire is now studying for her PhD at Sunderland and she shared with us the challenges she is currently facing of balancing research with the “compulsion to make”.  Working on film and with performers, there is a sense of the unreal, ethereal and emotional about her work.  She explores a merging of the senses with scenic landscape through site specific installations, to see its effect on embodiment.  She makes costumes for her carnival-like performers using vivid colour, ornament and stitches; her people, like her drawings, are full of motion and activity.  The movement of life is a theme very much at the heart of her work, which she described in the talk with great fondness and affection. One project, 'Oso Bay' (2008) involved an ex-marine who hurls a series of aluminium Frisbees, cast from marsh grasses, into a mud plain in South Texas. Claire filmed their flight and subsequent fall, capturing the way they connect the earth to sky in one brief moment.  In another, 'The Majorette', an acrobat stands by the banks of the River Tiber, spinning a stick lit with fire at both ends, perpetually keeping things alive and moving.  I found Claire’s talk sensitive and evocative, as she helped us glimpse the magical world that she creates, a world of movement, drama and performance.

Thomas Stoller: "Altering perceptions of daily experiences"
The second speaker was Thomas Stoller, a ceramic artist originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  He started using clay in 2009 as an undergraduate and was soon hooked, immediately liking the way it responds to the user’s touch.  He happily set about making mugs and cups in bright colours and designs.  After graduating, he went to Turkey for six months, and absorbed himself in their ceramic tile making tradition.  On returning, he gained a residency at the Moravian Tile Works in Philadelphia.  Before long, he was off on his travels once more, this time to Jingdezhen, China, the one-time porcelain capital of the world.  He was fascinated to find that over 70,000 people in the city are still associated with the ceramics industry.  One of the photographs he showed us during his talk pictured him in Jingdezhen, standing in an amazing giant ceramic vessel, larger even than himself.  By 2010, he was tackling his MA in Morgantown, West Virginia.  He could now acknowledge that, for him, the making part of the ceramics process was easy: what’s difficult, he admits, is getting down to the ideas.  So he started a daily ‘journal’ recording daily thoughts and feelings in words and images.  In time, he was able to use its content to inspire a more introspective style of expression, capturing something of his inner self in his work.  Over the years, he has been influenced by artists such as American abstract expressionist Barnette Newman. Newman’s paintings, he says, changed the way he looked at the world.  He asserts that “ceramics is the one language I know most about” and through development of its vocabulary, his work has evolved from utilitarian objects into more sculptural forms. Thomas is currently doing a PhD at Sunderland and looking into how ceramic artwork can alter perceptions of daily experience. His research now centres round how to extract experiential context from those forms.

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.