KATY HOLFORD: CREATIVE PATHWAYS 2

The trouble with writing and speaking is, it is linear. One word follows another, one sentence, paragraph, page follows another and I find it frustrating and a struggle to use words in this way because my creative process is not linear, it is wide open, chaotic and 3-dimensional.

One might think that the stage for this performance is my mind but it also happens physically, emotionally and spiritually as well as in the material world. Imagine a series of little explosions going off all over the place. Each explosion will be triggered by something. It might be an emotional response, a metaphor, a colour, a material, an idea for something useful or beautiful, a production technique, an aesthetic style, an intellectual argument, a discarded something in the street, a song. Then other things will be attracted to it and all of a sudden there is some mental and emotional heat which builds up, cooks everything together and once hot enough, explodes into the universe. These explosions happen randomly, sometimes in a bunch, others solitary. The time in between each one can be seconds through to years. The fragments of these explosions can lay shattered on the ground for a long time or they burn so brightly that my attention is attracted to them immediately. At some point though, I notice that fragment over there and then glance sideways and see a splinter of something different over here and I gather these splinters and fragments from different explosions and start playing with them and putting them together to make something new, or slightly different or surprising.

This does just happen most of the time whether my ego or conscious mind allows me to see it or not but of course it’s been going on for years now and I find fragments I thought I had forgotten which might unexpectedly fit very well with a piece of a recent explosion. The delight in these discoveries is intense.

The conditions for all of this to happen can of course be manufactured. A design brief triggers the process and a deadline speeds it up and limits it. With my more personal sculptural work it is a less contained and more organic process but there is a still a requirement to gather the fragments and channel the ideas into a final object.

This sorting, fitting and channelling does become much more of a linear process and there is a need for discipline and focus, a gathering and application of skills and experience and further investigation if new information is needed. Attention has to be paid to the needs of the client, the design brief, the market trends, or if it’s personal work the question of what I want to communicate with a piece.

Sometimes the whole process is unconscious and an object can appear fully formed in my imagination. I used not to trust this and didn’t know that I had been processing away without realising it but now I can discern the true spirit of the work and sometimes need to start from the object in my imagination and work backwards to understand where it came from.

My understanding of this creative process has evolved over time and it is affected by everything. I have come to realise that as an artist every part of one’s life is connected with one’s work. It cannot be separated or isolated. Every aspect has to be attended to, listened to, accepted, cherished, nourished; mind, body, spirit, emotions, personal and social life, work life, inner life and universal life. I have only just begun to understand this and I have only just begun to see myself as an artist.

This journey began when I was a child. I was instinctively and intuitively drawn to domestic objects, especially those made in glass, china and non precious metals and especially those which were hand made with skill and style. I liked going to my aunt’s house and playing with the objects there because they were different. They had different stories attached to them. This one was brought back from China when my Grandfather visited the country and seemed really exotic; this one was passed down in the family and belonged to my great Grandmother and had been preserved all this time in a glass cabinet.

I loved laying the table when family came for Sunday lunch because only then did I get to see and touch the best china and the blue glass and silver salt cellars and put an old but beautifully soft linen table cloth over the scratched wooden table. The trifle was made in a cut glass dish that my mother had had for years. The mint sauce was always made in the pressed glass jug and served with a green melamine spoon; the gravy was served in a pale grey ceramic gravy boat with a matching saucer. Then there was the everyday stuff we used in the kitchen, some of which belonged to my Grandmother. A worn tin with a bakelite top and a rusted spring hinge held the Jacobs Crackers, we even had a bakelite lemon squeezer. We used the, now classic, 1970s homemaker ceramic dishes from Woolworths and melamine plates, daily. There were scratched plastic mixing bowls and a tin measuring jug with a wooden handle. The emotions and values bound up in these objects still affect me and I have recently made some conceptual sculptural work with some of them.

As I grew up this unconscious delight in objects and materials grew with me and my curiosity developed. So that by the time I started art college I was on a journey to make objects. I remember a realisation that I am sure every maker and designer has at an early stage, that everything that we used in our daily lives had been created by somebody, whether it be a designer or an engineer or a craftsperson or just someone who decided he needed a specific thing and made it. It was a revelation to me. These objects didn’t spontaneously appear. Someone thought about what their purpose was and what they would look like and there were many ways of getting to the final look and feel of the thing.

My choice of degree course at North Staffordshire Polytechnic, the only multidisciplinary design course in the country is interesting in the light of the broad way I work now. It gave me the opportunity to try out lots of different disciplines before deciding on one. It was a difficult decision for me as I didn’t really want to narrow down so much. I was torn between ceramics (with a particular interest in semi automatic production which exists to this day) and glass. In the end there really wasn’t any competition. Glass was far more exciting, passionate, difficult and challenging. I still think of it, in essence, as fire versus mud. Even within the glass department I found it difficult to narrow my choices. I started to learn to blow glass. I experimented with other production techniques. I wanted to embrace them all. Designing seemed a way of working very broadly and innovatively in order to do this but I also had a love of making and materials.

I found I had an excitement about production techniques and a curiosity about pushing the boundaries of those techniques to produce more interesting or unusual outcomes. Factories fascinated me and designing enabled me to stretch across boundaries to bring ideas and processes and methodologies from one area and apply them to another.

My work and practice today cross many boundaries both tangible and invisible. Those are the boundaries between design, craft and fine art; glass and crystal, ceramic, metal, wood and other materials; craft processes, manufacturing methods and sculptural practice. These boundaries do not exist for me within my creative practice. They do however exist in the minds of the many audiences for my work and by my requirements to market to those audiences and sustain a living from my work.

I found it a huge frustration that my audience, whether they be clients for my design consultancy, buyers of my pieces from trade shows, audiences at galleries, arts organisations etc, would pigeon hole my work into a particular category. For many years I felt hampered by this attitude and rather stifled and as a young designer/maker/artist it was very difficult to receive recognition when one is working in many different areas. I have designed stemware, teapots, furniture, lighting, bathroom accessories, interior installations. I have designed and made products in glass and crystal, aluminium, pewter, wood, bamboo, ceramics, resin etc. I have worked for large corporate companies like Wedgwood and Sainsbury’s, small family firms like Perrier Jouet champagne and Czech and Speake and made unique pieces for hotels, Sheiks and private individuals. I have designed for the top end of the market right through to the bottom. I have made sculptures. I am really excited about working across all these boundaries. This is where the creative juice is for me. The work you see in the exhibition is an example of work sitting astride the boundary between furniture and sculpture and the physicality of the piece is a metaphor for this as well. The cone shaped bowl dissects the plane of the table, they are together and separate at the same time. There is a tension because of the perceived danger of glass touching glass.

What I have come to understand now is that the innate sense I had as a child of the value and meaning in objects is central to my work.

Objects embody so many meanings other than the literal. They are metaphorical, metaphysical, poetic, a reflection of society, class, culture, nationality, the domestic, the industrial, gender, the family, history and natural origins. They hold memories and emotions gathered as they have passed through different hands and generations. In our modern word we squander this essence. We are all familiar with the global economy and the demand and expectation, developed in our western world for cheap goods produced in the Far East which have high quality and good design values. I have become uncomfortable with the part I play in that process as a designer because of ethical and ecological issues and that is enough for me to want to change the way I work. However as well as the loss of ethical standards there is another loss going on here. The loss of meaning in those objects produced so far away from us by hard working people who have no idea how cheaply these things are regarded and how they will be thrown away once they stop being fashionable. The loss is not one dimensional, it encompasses all - no value associated with the production and the people and place where it is made, no value associated with the design, no value associated with the materials it is made from. From this starting point it is almost impossible for those objects to attract any further emotional meaning because they are not around long enough for memories and stories to attach themselves and love and energy to build within them.

At this point in my career I am in my small way attempting to redress the balance and bring meaning and beauty into the lives of both the customers who buy my work and the people who make it. I have made a decision to work as much as possible with ethical production and celebrate the artisans and the culture where the objects are made and start from a place of value. At the present time this means I am working with a pewter company in Sheffield and a crystal company in Somerset and I am building future collaborations with craft producers in Thailand where I spent a 5 month Arts Council funded placement 18 months ago.

I continue to make sculpture and work as a design consultant for companies engaged in ethical production. Glass and crystal remain my essential material. There is something about it which keeps me continually curious. Alchemy maybe.


Katy Holford,
Glass Artist and Designer

Creative Pathway 2 pdf

FOREWORD
Professor Tim Collins: Foreword

ESSAYS
Professor Andrew Brewerton: Glass Routes
Professor Keith Cummings: Continuity and Change in Glass History
Stuart Garfoot: The Glass Baton, A Personal Overview
Susanne Frantz: Glass Tiger
Associate Professor Xiaowei Zhuang: The Development of Studio Glass at Shanghai University
Associate Professor Guan Donghai: Creating With Glass
Dr Kristina Niedderer: Developing Glass Practice Through Creative Research
Xue Lu (Shelly): Growing With the Soil of China

Stuart Garfoot: Introduction to Creative Pathway
David Reekie: Creative Pathway 1
Katy Holford: Creative Pathway 2