Artist talks #5 - Jenny Purret & Devereux Huskie Glassworks
Jenny Purrett is one of the Artists participating in the Access To Arts colleges scheme (AA2A) which is set up to benefit artists and students alike. It allows artists to experiment with materials and techniques that would otherwise not normally be accessible to them for free, and benefits the students (Foundation in Art & Design in this case) by allowing them to participate with and view demonstrations by the artists.
Having spoken with Jenny previously about her practice, it was good to visually see her work in her presentation and how it related to what she'd told me. Her practice centres largely around recording through drawing and mark making, something which I was taught as a starting point in my FD in Art & Design. Unlike myself, she has carried this through when working with other materials. Her work is therefore one of the best examples of how practice can translate between different art forms, through the use of exploration, which I find inspiring.
Jenny has taken a number of residencies previously including VARC in 2011 at Highgreen in Tarset. Here she produced work that responded to the place through taking daily walks, often drawing and noting what she sensed at the time like the weather, later publishing these thoughts in weekly blogs throughout the 12 month residency.
She describes her practice as a 'record of seeing and of being; a shared existence in time and space between my surroundings and myself'. Sometimes she draws plants she comes across, other times she records the journey itself on maps that when viewed aside are continuous line drawings, sometimes turning back upon her route like in 'Year-long Line'. On other occasions she has recorded plants each day, overlapping line drawings, or erasing them with the remains of graphite giving shadows of the past on the wall (Symbiotic), thus giving the drawings temporality, representing life, growth and decay.
She often uses coloured pastels, charcoal, pencil, pen on paper, along with other materials such as wool, soap, and laolin. This again links back to her walks, this time gathering materials like wool caught on barbed wire that she later matted together into sheets. This was in response to her workshop being in an old laundry and shows how place can affect a work's meaning or be used to develop ideas. It was in this work that I could really see the potential link with glass's properties. Sunlight that streamed through the wool sheet giving it a translucence, highlighting the individual fibre as though drawn lines overlapped to create form. She described how drawn marks create something new every time and exhibit energy - I presume in the same way that automatic drawing expresses movement and energy.
In 2010 she produced work called 'Passing Time' that comprised of drawings showing the development of a bird's nest that illustrated the number of journeys made by the bird to build it from individual twigs. This is similar to how individual lines come together to make a drawing. These works were drawn on an enlarged scale, measuring 1.5 metres each. Looking back to her MA work, she realised how this linked to her more recent works in the collecting of leaves and pine needles.
Unlike Jenny's work, since studying Glass and Ceramics in 2015, there hasn't been so much in my work that links back to previous education in art and design. This is perhaps partly due to the gap in my art education with full time work, as well as not ever really knowing what or trying to produce any long-term project.
I am aware that my tastes are forever changing in what I like/dislike, learning that I am less concerned with making political themed work that makes a statement. That said, I am very aware that since producing 'Hidden Within Plain Sight', I have been addressing my curiosity in creating depth and multiple perspectives in my work, often incorporating partially hidden elements to add further interest to the viewer. This can be seen in 'Love, Rivalry, & Magic!', as well as in my current work in casting glass to represent buildings in fog - trying to capture the intangible. I suspect that these themes are not as obvious to others as they are to myself and my works don't look visually similar in this way but this may perhaps change in the future, only time will tell.
It is not only materials that Jenny experiments with, but also techniques. A most notable example is drawing with gunpowder. Jenny's often repeats and develops techniques multiple times. For example, she has used shotgun shells to project shot at canvases that ripped the surface to create graphite-like outlined tears mimicking silver-birch tree patterns. These were then hung from the ceiling in The Customs House in 2012. She also created a temporary drawing in gunpowder on the floor that was then lit leaving nothing tangible to be taken away as more of a performance piece.
As a former teacher, she is very approachable and seems to enjoy working with people. This included working with a group of people in South Shields who had visual impairment. She learnt how important the light was to these people and experienced them drawing and painting to represent scenes across the bay that were based not only on current observation (as Jenny's work mainly is), but also on their previous memory of when they could see more clearly, again linking to the importance of environment in work. It also gave the people involved enjoyment in the shared creation and collaboration rather than concentrating on accuracy of the end result. This is something I'm sure all artists can relate to - the enjoyment from creating.
Sometimes it is good to use material in a way that is sensitive to it, and sometimes the opposite can expose it's delicacy and change its properties. Such an example is when Jenny drew of Japanese paper with coloured pastels to record light and dark variations of the same colour. She described the material as perfect but fragile and she changed these qualities by soaking the paper in the bath. The colours remained and blurred and the paper took on wrinkles, becoming soft and not so perfect. Drawings of rock formations became crinkled shapes representing shells and waves. She has experimented with this paper further in her ceramic work by dipping this paper in slip, as well as experimenting with frit on plaster bats to create drawings using coloured glass.
I really like some of her work where she has experimented with copper wheel engraving to produce marks on glass like she does on paper. She has used both sides of the glass to explore depth, also using sandblasting to limit certain views, and even using marbles of glass to explore glass's optic qualities in distorting and enlarging certain details in ways I would have never thought of.
After seeing and hearing about her work, I plan on recording my own journeys in line and journal entries when I go walking in the Lake District this coming summer. I may then possibly use this to revisit a landscape module from 2016, rather than forcing to produce a work in glass, I will instead follow the process through drawing to see where it ultimately ends up.
Devereux & Huskie Glassworks consist of James Devereux & Kate Huskie.
James grew up in Bristol and after attending the local glassworks factory for his school work experience he became interested in working with glass. He practiced with every chance he got, and began working there at weekends. During his degree he used his passion for scuba diving to create sculptural forms and placed them underwater, not realising that the clear glass actually disappeared and so coloured components appeared to float unconnected. He quit his Masters degree realising that he mainly enjoyed producing works for other people. He worked at the Liquid Glass Centre for free and there he met Kate and the two kept in touch.
He established his own studio with just £8000 from his father and called in a lot of favours from people he'd helped or worked for over the years to get established, including constructing a glory hole from a beer barrel. He had promised Kate that when she finished travelling Australia that there would be an assistant's position available for her on her return. In the meantime he also worked as a technician at the RCA (Royal College of Art in London) for 2 years and kept travelling back to his studio whenever possible to produce works and hiring it out on occasion to other artists such as Louis Thompson to work on The Jerwood Prize. In the end he decided the technician job was impacting on the amount of studio time he had and so he went back to working in his studio producing works mainly for other people, although he does on occasion work on his own work.
Kate originally took a BA at The University of Sunderland in Glass & Ceramics and specialised in blown glass. After graduating she moved to Australia and travelled to various glass hot shops spending time there from 6 weeks to 2.5 months, visiting The Jam Factory, Nick Mount Glass, and embraced learning many techniques and working with artists including Lino Tagliapietra. She eventually moved back to the UK where James had offered her a business partnership to set up a new workshop.
They have produced work for and with a lot of internationally famous hot glass artists including, Pia Wustenberg's 'Stacking Vessels', Flavie Audi's 'Piece of Sky', Rachael Woodman's 'Gathering II', Tim Rawlinson's 'Echoes of Light', Louis Thompson's 'Devotion', Enemark & Thompson's 'Panacum', Luke Jerram's 'C. Elegans (glass microbiology)', Magdalene Odundo's Transition II (working alongside James Maskrey to produce 600 pieces) and many more.
Kate's individual work is often based around colourful blown geometric cubes that can be placed together or separately depending upon the exhibition space.
James described how he had been inspired by museum pieces and that he often made as many as 10-15 pieces, only to then select 1 to be exhibited. He is inspired stone hand tools and this is apparent from some of his work. James and Kate demonstrated the making of one of these pieces the following day. It is nice to see how they work together in a pair to produce pieces, the same way we are taught to work in hot glass at Sunderland, rather than working alone. Kate did a lot of the manual lifting of the work while James directed her and applied the finished form by using a toffee hammer to take chips out of the glass's edge like when knapping flint.
Although hot glass is not my specialism, I can appreciate the hard work involved to set up a studio and the relentless hard work involved to keep it going and transform it into a successful business and career.
