THE PLACE AND THE WORK: Master Classes

2014 Programme: The Place and The Work

Making art works in relation to place is the focus of our Conference and Master Classes this year; acknowledging how artists and their work connect to their surroundings, landscape, architecture, history and social context.

CLASS 1: Petr Stanicky

The Unique Genius Loci of the Space.
27^th August – 4^th September. Cost: £895 (9 day class – includes course fees, materials and evening meals)

“A reflection of the unique genius loci of the space. Sculpture, objects or installation. The idea is to let the unique qualities of North Lands’ surroundings influence the art works. Be open to nature, face new qualities of light, scale and let all of this influence artworks.

This will be a unique opportunity to access the hotshop in the middle of a remote landscape and to work with all kinds of techniques which hot glass offers. It will be an ideal situation to create, discover and open new paths in an artist’s work.”

Hot glass techniques will be experimental and developed according to the concepts of the class participants. Work will be researched in different media such as drawing, photography and model making. Some experience in hot glass techniques is beneficial. There will be a gaffer to realise ideas into glass for those with limited hot glass experience.

About Petr Stanicky:
The breadth of Petr Stanicky’s work is reflected in his rich and diverse studies in the Czech Republic and the USA. At the AAAD in Prague he studied sculpture, specialising in stone carving and glass in architecture; he graduated in 2000. By 2007 he had been teaching sculpture at the arts academy for 4 years when he decided to immerse himself in a study of the figure, joining a masters program at the New York Arts Academy. From there he gained experience working on sculptural projects in Jeff Koons’ studio. On returning to the Czech Republic he chose to lead a new masters program in glass at Tomas Bata University in Zlín. He describes the ethos: ‘Working in the studio makes students perceive the unity and the close relationship between human beings and nature. It helps them perceive and understand the substance, the colour and the space. It helps students exceed the limits of their perception beyond the entity designed and delimit it within architecture.’

Stanicky is an artist working from a wide material knowledge and extensive skill base. He allows himself the freedom to move between representational and abstract art, traditional and non traditional materials but always with academic rigor. His work has been widely exhibited in Europe and debuts in the UK this May at the National Glass Centre, Sunderland.

CLASS 2: Helen Maurer & Angela Moore

The Lie of the Land
30^th August to 4^th September. Cost: £650 (6 day class – includes course fees, materials and evening meals)

“Over the course of six days we’ll be looking at the relationship between images and objects, setting up a series of exercises using glass, light and the landscape to generate material. Expect to be projecting into fog, distorting the landscape though glass and working with the elements.  The emphasis will be on using low-fi production methods and experimentation.

Participants will need to bring their own camera and to both document experiments and produce images as the final outcome. There’ll be opportunities to collaborate within the group, to share skills and generate new ideas.  In our experience this has been surprising, taking us to unknown territories and now to the Highlands and beyond!”
This class is site specific open to glassmakers and artists of all media.

About Helen Maurer:
Helen Maurer’s early studies were in Visual and Performing Arts at Brighton University. Later she studied glass at Central St Martins School of Art and the Royal College of Art. She is represented by Danielle Arnaud gallery London and also works on site specific commissions. She collaborates with other artists, choreographers and musicians. Maurer was awarded the Jerwood Prize for Glass in 2003 for her unique approach to glass. “Where possible I like reconfiguring existing things, finding participants for the scenes that I create, almost like auditioning actors for parts, objects are brought in and out of my constructions. Ideas come from experimenting with materials, for example projecting light through objects to create shadows.” Her work often starts with a tableau of varying scale which is projected into static or moving image, defining the space it is placed in. Recently her work has been developed by filming the optical effects discovered during its construction and projecting this as part of the work.

About Angela Moore:
Angela Moore is a photographer known for her high profile campaign photography connected to the art and design world. Her work is used in magazines worldwide and includes highly innovative projects for Frieze Art Fair, Vitra, Kvadrat, SCP, Tord Boontje, the Design Museum and Modus. Her sensitive understanding of the contemporary image and culture has led to the current demand for her work. She has photographed cookbooks for Heston Blumenthal, Canteen and Nigel Slater and extensively for Swarovski’s Crystallized publication. Angela’s work has been exhibited in Thessaloniki Museum of Photography and Monat der Fotografie, Vienna. She studied design at Goldsmiths College of Art in London, the city in which she still lives and works.

Helen and Angela first worked together on a commission for the Pump House Gallery where they started their ‘Bad Magic’ project. They went on to create work for the Swarovski magazine, Crystallized, which involved visually interpreting the ‘Trends’ pages. They share an interest for illusory and distorted images, a quirky low-fi aesthetic and an interest in the effects of light and projection.

CLASS 3: Kristiina Uslar

Influences, Layers and Columns.
9^th September- 17^th September. Cost: £895 (9 day class – includes course fees, materials and evening meals)

Estonian artist Kristiina Uslar will lead a class focused on pâte de verre: “In my class I would like to teach how to make multilayered glass objects using the pâte de verre technique and to introduce different layer connections using columns. The result should be a combination of fragility, airiness and strength. The soul of the object should be influenced by its surrounding environment, individuals and emotions. Our surroundings shape the person inside us.

Glass – such a versatile and contradictory material – large and light, small and heavy, strong and frail, transparent and opaque. For me it is the most suitable mediator between wonderland and reality. Exploring this, participants will make their own works in pâte de verre. They will take inspiration from the area, its cultured scenery and nature.” For this class a basic understanding of mould making and kiln working in glass is necessary.

About Kristiina Uslar
Kristiina graduated from the Estonia Academy of Art in 2003 where she later taught in the glass department. She completed an MA in 2007 in which she focused on the construction of Roman cage cups, this open net structure is evident in her own works. Using pâte de verre she takes a historical process with qualities she describes as tender and fragile, and subverts them by making bold and decisive forms with an industrial reference; organic and mechanical at the same time.

“My intention and goal was not to restore the technique but to study and develop it toward artwork and through this to gradually unfold the variety of ways in which the technique can be innovated.” The unexpected transformation of material also takes us from the historical to the contemporary. Kristiina Uslar is a glass artist who, by reinventing a process, has brought new life to it. She describes glass as “the most suitable mediator between wonderland and reality.”

She lives and works in Estonia and has been exhibiting her work in Europe, the USA and Japan since 2001. Her work has been acknowledged in various glass awards and is held in many major collections.

CLASS 4: Richard William Wheater

Are You Experienced?
9^th September – 17^th September. Cost: £895 (9 day class – includes course fees, materials and evening meals)

“A Jimi Hendrix Album title? A prospective employer’s question?

A game changing challenge! Set by an artist to participants of a 9 day workshop.

Expect what was stationary to be on wheels. Expect the four walls of a studio to be cut like an umbilical cord. Expect adventures in hot glass and neon. Expect to fail, many times.”

This class will be a unique opportunity to work with Richard William Wheater to combine furnace glass and neon. Participants will work in the studio and in outdoor locations. Some experience in hot glass techniques is beneficial.

About Richard William Wheater:
Richard William Wheater gained notoriety for an ambitious project in 2008 titled ‘Them and Us’. Touring the UK with his mobile furnace he hot sculpted indigenous glass birds in their natural habitat, he then released them into the air in a ritualistic act, which both freed and destroyed them. An artist/performer committed to the act of making and the science of materials, his work is also ephemeral transitory art, involving place and people. It is always beautifully recorded. In recent years an in-depth study of neon has involved equally image and media aware events such as ‘12 months of neon love’, in which a highly visible neon bill board announced declarations of love, lines from popular songs which changed once a month. Other neon works made and put into action with groups of people aim to unite people with landscape as did his recent ‘Land to Sea’ project. Installations have been both site specific and gallery based. Wheater might start with making an object but it extends further.

As a communicator, designer and artist he wants clarity and accessibility in the medium. He is highly qualified in glass making, art and teaching. He studied at Edinburgh College of Art, Alfred University USA and the University of Sunderland. He lives in Wakefield, UK.

HOW TO APPLY
Master Class places are juried and places given by our selection panel.

To apply:
First send in your booking form. Click here to send your booking form
We will then contact you and ask you to send the following:

• A brief CV outlining your previous experience.
• A short statement (max 1 page A4) outlining the benefit of the Class to your artistic practice.
• 10 images of recent work, please include title, date made, dimensions and techniques used.

For more information email Grace at info@northlandsglass.com or call 01593 721 229

The Place and The Work

 

2014 International Conference and Master Classes.

The Place and The Work Conference will be held on Saturday 6, Sunday 7 September. Class sessions run 27 August – 4 September and 9 – 16 September. Making art works in relation to place is the focus of the North Lands Creative Glass Conference and Master Classes 2014; acknowledging how artists and their work connect to their surroundings, landscape, architecture, history and social context. We see more interactive public art, more artists responding to and working with communities. Artists are making works that respond to weather, nature or urban environments, to political discourse and social situations. It seems that some artists and public demand less autonomous disconnected sculpture favouring instead a more connected vision. We ask questions about what it means to experience remoteness, how this and being in a place away from home affect an artist’s work. What influences the particularities of a landscape can have and what it means to collaborate with artists in close proximity, to work intensively with no distractions and to embrace or reject the surroundings. What can happen when we go beyond our familiar studio environment and step outside into a bigger picture? What does it mean to be a glass specialist in this place, at this time? More details for the Classes and Conference programme will be announced shortly.

Photo credit: James Ross

Master Class Programme Update

Unfortunately Tiina Sarapu is no longer able to come to North Lands for her class on 10-18 September. Our Artistic Director, Mieke Groot, asked Eeva Käsper to lead a class in Tiina’s place and we’re delighted that she agreed.

The details of Eeva’s class are as follows:

10-18 September:  ‘Influences’

We are often (always) influenced by something or someone. With this Master Class I invite the participants to discover and to map the influences which guide and affect us throughout our lives, or which are important to us at any given moment. By mapping them, we can better recognize their impact on ourselves as artists as well as find inspiration for our creative work. I am convinced that by working openly with the influences we experience, we can turn them in the direction that best suits us, and exploit them deliberately, even when they involve contradictions.

Sheet glass is a wonderful source material which, with the help of heat and gravitation, can transform from two-dimensional into three-dimensional, which enables playing with transparency, layers, surfaces and edges, surface structures, graphic images, reflections and optical distortions. Slumping techniques allow a lot of playfulness. In addition to various molds used in slumping, the process can also be interferred with during firing: one can influence it physically, or simply observe and end the process at a suitable moment.

Thanks to the transparency of glass, the finished work is always affected by its surroundings, and so further and unpredictable influences will come to bear on the final art piece.

Eeva Käsper

Click here to apply for Eeva’s Master Class on our website

2013 Master Class and Conference Programme

See full details of our programme in this year’s brochure

Master Classes

28 Aug – 5 Sept: ‘Working the Surface – Texture, Detail, Stories and Patterns’
Deborah Cocks is regarded as one of Australia’s foremost exponents of reverse glass painting.This class will build a repertoire of glass painting techniques by experimenting with vitreous paints and silver stain in conjunction with cold techniques.

28 Aug – 5 Sept: ‘The Gravity of the Objects’
Anne-lise Riond Sibony is one of France’s most innovative artists working with glass. This class will concentrate on small-scale installations and compositions made from an assemblage of non-identical elements. The main technique will be blowing – from free-blown shapes to painted mould-blown artefacts.

10 Sept – 18 Sept: ‘On the Edge of Knowing’
Tiina Sarapu is one of Estonia’s leading artists working in glass. The focus of this class will be on personal expression and vision. From first working with paper as the simulation material for glass, Tiina will explore different slumping techniques with sheet glass.

10 Sept – 18 Sept: ‘Unknowns’
Ceramic artist Richard Slee is one of british craft’s most compelling figures. He will lead this class in an exploration of free-formed blown glass, in partnership with the participants and with the expert help of artist and glassblower Richard Price.

International Conference – ‘The Real Thing: Beyond Stereotyping’
7 and 8 September

The Conference will explore cultural identities. Speakers will include the Master Class leaders; Keynote speaker Judy Rudoe FSA, author and curator at the British Museum, specialising in jewellery together with 19^th and 20^th century decorative arts; Judy Tuwaletstiwa, writer,mixed media painter from the US and during the past year Exchange Artist with Bullseye Glass; curator, writer and historian Elizabeth Cumming and Annette Schmidt, leader of an international excavation in Djenne Mali and Curator Africa at the Museum of Ethnology Leiden since 2002.

The Conference is sponsored by the Corning Incorporated, USA and is supported by Bullseye Glass Co.

Apply for Master Classes and book Conference places online

Print a booking form

Contact Grace MacBeath for any further information:
grace.macbeath@northlandsglass.com
Tel: 01593721229

Highland Inspiration

We were delighted to recently host two nine-day international symposia at North Lands Creative Glass. For North Lands it is wonderful to have the chance to host and work with instructors, artists and students with such great enthusiasm, motivation and dedication and we hope to see you all again very soon.

The first was a Student Symposium; ‘Highland Inspiration – Location and Self’ with students and instructors from three schools: The Alberta College of Art + Design, Calgary; the Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY and the Montana State University School of Architecture, Bozeman. The students valued the input of the instructors enormously; Natali Rodrigues, Michael Rogers and Tad Bradley, along with Jane Bruce were kept extremely busy and everyone seemed to enjoy and gain a lot from their experiences.

The second was a Symposium for artists exploring ‘Highland Inspiration – Location & Perception’, led by Jane Bruce assisted by Lee Mathers. The artists were invited to focus on an experimental and open-minded approach to working and utilise drawing, model making, and the prototyping of forms, to test and question their ideas against the Caithness environment, the goal being to deepen and intensify current work or push it forward into new directions.

Both Symposia benefitted from local co-ordination for facilities and outings by our very own Joanna Garrett, better known as North Lands’ Master Class and Conference Co-ordinator.

Photographs by kind permission of Symposium participants Linda Norris and Rachel Elliott.

Master Class and Conference Brochure

You can now see full details of our 2012 Master Class and Conference programme in our brochure

Master Class and Conference Booking Form

Master Classes for 2012 will be running between 29 August to 19 September.

We offer a total of four Master Classes, with two running concurrently before the Conference and two after. The first two Master Classes will run from 29 August to 6 September with Angela Jarman and Jacqui Poncelet. The second two Classes will run from 11 to 19 September with Paul Marioni and Susan Stinsmuehlen-Amend.

Our International Conference ‘Give-and-Take’ will take place on Saturday 8, Sunday 9 September 2012. The conference will explore conceptual and stylistic exchanges over time, between different cultures and media.

Artists in Residence

We’re very excited about our upcoming Spring residency; Kiln Forming and Kiln Casting. The residency runs from 16 April – 10 June 2012 and we have four artists who we’re sure will bring very special qualities to North Lands. We can’t wait to see what they do in there time here.

The artists are:

Megan Biddle, USA;
Jennifer Ashley King, Australia;
Melinda Willis, Australia;
Carrie Iverson, USA.

A few pictures of their work by way of introduction, thanks to the artists for permission to use these images.

Festive Glass Activities at North Lands

Join us for our drop-in Christmas Family Day on Sunday 11 December, 12.00 – 16.00. Design and make your own glass Christmas decoration. All materials are provided and activities are suitable for all ages. Cost £5 per decoration

Make festive gifts and get an introduction to glass making in our Christmas Evening Classes. Pendant Making on 14 December and Christmas Decorations on 15 December, 6.30-9.30pm. You will develop glass cutting skills, learn fusing techniques and, in the Christmas Decorations class, also experiment with frits and powders. Both classes are suitable for beginners and include all materials. They cost £30 per class, or book both for £50.

Check our website for more information and Evening Class booking details http://www.northlandsglass.com/category/events

Kiln Forming & Kiln Casting Residency – open for applications

Kiln Forming & Kiln Casting Residency

Monday 16 April – Sunday 10 June 2012

Application Deadline: 2 December 2011

We are offering an eight week residency for four talented glass artists. We are looking for artists who have an interest in exploring new forms of making, or ways of working, through collaboration. The residency will be focusing primarily on kiln working (fusing, slumping, casting, painting etc.).

You will have the opportunity to create work and collaborate with artists while also learning new techniques. This opportunity will allow you to enhance your own practice while working within a peer group to gain further skills. Artists-in-residence benefit from a comprehensive range of facilities.

The residency provides eight weeks access to North Lands facilities. Access is 7 days per week, however our Technical Manager is only available Monday to Friday. Facilities include kiln room, mould room, cold working facilities, general purpose/drawing room, and all related tools and equipment. North Lands hot glass workshop is not available for access.

terms and conditions and application details are on our website