5 glass artists who are making waves

11 February 2020

The people pushing the boundaries of glassmaking

11 February 2020

Glass artist Alexandra Muresan in her studio in Cluj Napoca, Romania. Photo: Șumlea Marius

Glassmaking is having a moment, helped by a new generation of talent who are challenging the limitations and scale of the material. Crafts magazine selects five innovative glass artists to know – all of which exhibited at the 2020 Collect art fair.

Duality 020, Alexandra Muresan, glass and metal, 2019. Photo: Angus Mackay

Alexandra Muresan

Romanian glassmaker Alexandra Muresan creates astonishing sculptural pieces, in which recycled glass is fused with materials such as metal. Her powerfully emotional work, exploring fragility, grace and violence, pushes the very limits of what is conventionally beautiful. ‘Giving another chance to glass objects that were considered trash fascinates me,’ she says. She exhibited with North Lands Creative at Collect.

Morten Klitgaard

Danish glass artist Morten Klitgaard is among the new generation of makers exploring the possibilities of glass as a material. His beautiful, heavily worked and distressed pieces have a surface patina as complex as ceramic, achieved by applying different oxides during the last heating. He showed work with London Glassblowing at Collect.

Thou Shalt Have II, Elliot Walker. Photo: courtesy the artist

Elliot Walker

Elliot Walker makes exquisitely refined narrative still-life glass pieces using a technique called massello. At Collect with Vessel Gallery, he presented the largest artwork he has made to date, inspired by Dutch paintings, which included bottles, jugs, bowls and lobsters, modelled in clear glass. ‘The pieces are not cast, carved or ground into shape, but modelled from a cooling liquid so that until the very last second the sculpture is a moving, living entity, frozen in time as the glass sets,’ says the glassmaker.

Anne Petters

Petters uses a technique, based on pâte de verre, for shaping glass while in the kiln into diaphanous rippled sheets similar to paper, with marks like writing on them made using a type of frit. ‘The frit looks like ice. And my work is quite conceptual. It is about freezing thoughts,’ says the glass artist. ‘A lot of my work is about freezing ephemeral moments, wanting to have control.’ Bullseye Projects exhibited her work at Collect.

Laura Quinn

Laura Quinn makes spectacular wearables: she marries glass to materials such as metal or off-cuts of leather to create dramatic, flexible and eminently functional jewellery. ‘I want people to touch it, to not be frightened of glass,’ says the artist, who exhibited with North Lands Creative at Collect. ‘I was trying to push through the psychological barrier that glass is too fragile to wear or handle – that it has to be put on a shelf to gather dust.’ In creating objects that invite emotional attachment and resist our unthinking, throwaway culture, these works fit in with her wider interest in reducing the environmental impact of glasswork.

This is an edited extract from an article in Crafts magazine

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