Two world wars and the financial shocks of the first half of the 20th century threatened the benign triad of patronage, high craftsmanship and creative ambition. But as further examples in this room testify, the expansion of art schools and technical colleges, and the revival of the British economy postwar inspired a revival. Geoffrey Clarke, John Piper and, later, Brian Clarke, made stained glass to reflect 20th-century sensibilities. Laurence Whistler transformed engraving into an elusive, poetic medium.
Sam Herman and Peter Layton, among others, led the studio glass movement in the UK from the 1960s, exploring the medium’s capacity for creative, painterly and sculptural expression. They have been the inspiration for other star figures in the show. Monster Chetwynd’s otherworldly, radiant, lustred-glass scenario, St. Bede Enters the Monastery (2022), was made in collaboration with hot glass specialist James Maskrey, senior technician at the University of Sunderland, an artist represented here in his own right. Anne Vibeke Mou’s haunting pair of glass cornucopias, part of the project Wild Things Inwards (2022), made from vintage lead crystal tableware, melted, reworked, and then decorated with diamond point engraving, was inspired by Whistler. Meanwhile Ayako Tani offers a homage, with her own exquisite Albatross Island (2018), to the glass ships in bottles produced in 1980s Sunderland, made, with great skill, using the technique of lamp worked borosilicate glass once essential to science.