Glassworlds

I’m having the most extraordinary creative relationship with Penelope Jane Ross. We’ve never met, but the friendship that’s developed from our exchanges at Insta ‘direct messaging’ have coalesced into the most beautiful range of glass pieces, made by Jane using source drawings of mine, now emerged as a range of pieces under the name Glassworlds.

What I enjoy about this so much, is the translation required when Jane sets about adapting a drawing into a relief-model sculpted from Plasticene. The model is then cast as a plaster mould, filled with glass chips and placed in a kiln, emerging transformed as a coloured glass version of her original sculpt.

It’s one thing to realise a flat drawing made in a folk-art idiom into a free-standing, bas-relief sculpt, but an even more extraordinary one when the sculpt is transformed into coloured glass, with the flows, eddies and bubbles of its liquid form hardened into a material so distant from the graphite and paper of the origin art. Something flat and graphic turned into shimmer and gleam and transparency, the patterning becoming a sort of brocade stitched out of light.

The early pieces made were on a small scale and quite soft in their modelling so that the results, cast in aqua blues and greens, were reminiscent of sea-glass. The effect was dreamier than my crisp and graphic drawings, and had the results been placed at the bottom of a well or scattered in the stones and silt of a stream-bed, it would have been easy to mistake them as dating back a hundred years or more. Some, like the cavalryman below cast in rose pink, had opalescent depths.

First Jane made animals and items I’d drawn out of my love for vintage Erzgebirge, the region of Germany famous for its wooden toys. But quite quickly I got to thinking that maybe the cast of characters would sit well within a setting, so I made drawings of toy houses and trees for her to sculpt.

At my Insta page I began to describe the colours in terms of being edible: the rose of Turkish Delight, the citrus fruits of boiled sweets and the greens of pistachios.

Jane devised self-coloured pedestals that were added, so the flat-backed pieces could stand, ideally placed where the light could shine through them.

As the project evolved – and with a bit of technical advice from my frequent collaborator David W. Slack – Jane began making positive casts of the original Plasticene sculpts. These positive casts permitted multiple plaster negative moulds to be made from them. While the plaster moulds are always destroyed in the process of removing the cast glass figurines, there’s no longer the problem that for every plaster cast there’s a lost Plasticene sculpt. Now Jane has positive casts that can be used to generate multiple plaster moulds, and she doesn’t have to make a new Plasticene sculpt for every glass cast.

A new development has been the introduction of vibrant colours, and the recent work emerging from the kilns is as richly hued as anything you might see in the window of one of the great cathedrals. The modelling has become crisper, and as a result the decorative surfaces are more sharply defined. I love both the earlier, slightly dreamier figurines, and these fruit-drop coloured beauties, equally. Creativity needs to evolve as the artist explores all options, and the latest version is just different to the last, not a replacement.

The original drawings had been made for my friend Gloria at Sussex Lustreware for a new range of lustreware ceramic titled Summer. The goat, cavalryman on a wheeled horse and dog had already appeared on the lustreware at the time Jane was trying them out in glass form.

Soon I was producing new drawings for Jane with the express intention of them becoming elements in the Glassworlds series. The arched building and the cat below were both made for Jane, but then transmigrated to the lustreware. The traffic flows in both directions.

See more of Glassworlds at Jane’s website and shop

HERE

And you can visit the Sussex Lustreware shop by clicking

HERE