GLASS ROUTES

A silica variant on the Silk Road, Glass Routes together with its accompanying symposium Creative Pathways charts the migration, across four decades, of working horizons in contemporary glass, and of glass education in our time – movement arising both within, and at the intersection of, very distinctive individual paths. Necessarily so, for, as it is written in the Dao, the road that can be followed is not the true way.

Perhaps all pathways, and most certainly creative ones, are pathways only in retrospect, untraceable until once they have been trodden, apparent only in the irresistible delusion of hindsight, therefore – and not the uncertain, occasionally wayward or transgressive matter of breaking new ground.

I recall in 1995 volunteering to participate in British Council education fairs in southern China on the basis that I could skip the shopping in Hong Kong and spend three days between fairs in Shanghai. When Vaughan Grylls, my predecessor as Dean of Art & Design at Wolverhampton, asked me why, exactly, I replied in all honestly that I didn’t know, except that my intuition told me there was something important to connect with there.

This may have been the same week that I had to inform him that Charlotte de Syllas, someone he did not know but who had been working in the Glass Department for some weeks on fine-casting techniques, who had absolutely no formal status within the institution and was not only therefore not insured but de facto in breach of School Health & Safety procedure, had just won the Jerwood Prize for Jewellery.

Vaughan’s encouragement and support helped speed our work in China where procedural inertia might have slowed or damaged initial confidence.

What interests me here – as much, if not more than, the present question of academic and artistic development in glass – is the business of lived experience, as the Danish philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard wrote in his Journal of 1843:

It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition: it must be lived forwards.

By this business of lived experience I mean performative questions of human culture, community, ideas, identity and ecology, and the fragile moments in time when such histories are either acquired or lost. In an age littered with digital fingerprints - so - called because so much of human identity still proceeds by touch - I am interested in the kinds of identity that may indeed be lost, but can’t be stolen.

My imagination lights up before the not yet: in those moments where the path (to labour the metaphor a little further) is as yet indiscernible; where there is perhaps nothing more to be intuited than a feint forward echo, a sense of beckoning, or direction, or simply the urge to move. That restless instinct by which we migrate to a new place, crosses over the inevitable terrain stretching outward between here and there. Because the difference between something happening or not happening is sometimes very slight: a difference usually involving some kind of extraordinary human commitment.

This might appear a useful if abstract philosophical backdrop, framing legitimate concerns however regarding the present vulnerability of art education in the West, and of craft education in particular. By way of timely reminder, however, the symposium, Creative Pathways, and this exhibition, Glass Routes, both of which have been devised and curated by Stuart Garfoot, chart in some detail just such a moment in present time.

They concern the various individual creative pathways of leading glass practitioners, and seek to outline the journey undertaken by the glass community linked to Wolverhampton (and formerly to the glass course at Stourbridge College) over the last forty years. The show aims pragmatically to be illustrative where it could not hope to provide a comprehensive exhibition of more than a generation of work.

These linked events helpfully extend and update an earlier initiative, the ground-breaking New Glass Economy exhibition (Brewerton1999a) that in July 1999 took thirty years of glass at Wolverhampton to Shanghai, showing in the UK later that year at the University of Hertfordshire’s Atrium Gallery.

Curated by Sarah Bowler, that event was marked by the unveiling of Bamboo Scroll, a three metre high, 1.75 tonne sculptural work in steel and glass crystal commissioned from Colin Reid (Brewerton 1999b) and installed as a permanent feature in the main entrance hall of the new Shanghai Public Library in the year of its opening.

As a project, Bamboo Scroll had taken some three years to negotiate, and became the most visible public icon of our collaborative partnership. The concept took as its point of departure ancient Chinese literary artefacts, namely engraved bamboo strips bound together and forming a kind of flexible scroll. The brief was I believe unconsciously informed by the bamboo scaffolding which seemed to fill the library when I first visited it as a building site in April 1996. Chinese written characters are incorporated in cast optical crystal blocks in raised and polished relief, providing cursive transparent windows into the light medium. The glass is held in a parallel ribbon structure of flame-cut and patinated steel.

The Chinese characters derive from engraved print originals, reversed out in raised relief through the mould making process, and they comprise a loosely ordered series representing elemental natural and human qualities. This was not a text as such - there is no woven narrative connection between the word sequence - but the layered disposition of Chinese written characters had clearly influenced the overall composition of the piece. This was Reid’s first engagement with written symbols as found object and it is the visual energy of these characters rather than their linguistic meaning, that stands foremost. Physically and metaphorically speaking, the characters hang luminous and illuminated in broad daylight. A work in which material preceded meaning, and making came before knowing.

Reid’s attention to the site of this work, his response to the library as a location, its cultural purpose, the eventual elevation of the installation against a great curtain of daylight, and the central well space of the entrance hall, characterise his technique of invention. A technique that travels light, wears its learning lightly, and resulted in a major work which drew deftly upon two cultures, winning immediate acceptance in both.

In the hot course of ten July days, New Glass Economy drew more than eighteen thousand visitors (before the attendants stopped their head-count), such was the curiosity and appetite for this strange new work. Were we sure, I was asked at a public seminar, that everything in the show was made of glass?

New Glass Economy evidenced the fundamental significance and substantive role of British art schools in developing the studio glass economy that replaced the declining UK handmade, manufacturing tradition of the last four decades of the twentieth century.

In the introductory essay to the published catalogue for New Glass Economy, I had included an aside which on that occasion did not survive Sara’s disapproving editorial knife, but which I trust she will forgive me for restoring here. The note made reference to the decade I worked in the glass crystal industry (‘sounds like your own private Cultural Revolution?’ my Shanghai colleague Pan Yaochang once observed with the lightest touch of mischief).

I had likened the awareness of my historical moment in Stourbridge - my glasshouse experience - to that of the nineteenth-century American writer, Herman Melville, whose masterpiece Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1850) can be read as a sustained elegy to the human culture of the Nantucket whaling industry before the advent of new technology, in the form of the mechanical harpoon, destroyed it. In what was still called the new world Melville both lived and wrote its passing, the fragile human ecology of which is encrypted in his naming the fictive whaleboat The Pequod after an extinct Native American tribe. (Mason 1638).

My analogous experience - as Glasshouse, and eventually Production Manager at Stuart Crystal - struck me as precisely such a moment. Just as the heavy nostalgia of an exact replica of the cut crystal captain’s bowl from the White Star transatlantic liner, Titanic, proved a rather compelling exhibit for Shanghai teenagers in the exhibition that opened just as (in a coincidence that simply could not have been scripted two years previously!) Kate Winslett and Leonardo di Caprio premièred in the Shanghai screening of, well, that film. Within three years of New Glass Economy, glassmaking at the Redhouse Glassworks (built in 1776) and at the Stuart Crystal factory at the White House glassworks next door, had folded with the closure of the site in March 2002.

The Shanghai projects grew out of a close collaboration that began in January 1996 between the glass programme at Wolverhampton, where it was my privilege to succeed Keith Cummings as course leader in 1994, and the College of Fine Arts at Shanghai University. Before long, a similar link was forged with Tsinghua University in Beijing a program that benefited from the generosity of the glass artist Yang Hui-Shan and her production company Liuligongfang, by far the most significant and innovative brand in contemporary Chinese glass.

These initiatives were preceded by the collaborative development of an academic glass facility and programme at Technikon Pretoria (now Tshwane University of Technology) in the Republic of South Africa, with very significant industrial sponsorship from Consol Glass that we were instrumental in negotiating over two days in Pretoria. Together with industry linkage, subsequently identified by the Design Council as a case study in good practice and featured in the 2003 final report of the British government’s Lambert Review of Business-University Collaboration, the glass programme at Wolverhampton was keen to prove that our developing identity would be defined more by where we set the horizon, than where we place the boundary.

The collaboration with Shanghai University developed as a long-term vision: involving research; public art projects; the construction of new glass curricula and facilities in China; industry linkage; and curated shows. It worked effectively for many reasons, not least because of the extraordinary energy of the partnership with my colleague Professor Wang Dawei at the College of Fine Arts, and also the exceptional understanding and commitment of my colleague Ida Wong (1962 – 2008), to whose memory the symposium and exhibition are dedicated following her tragic death, after long illness, in March this year.

At a time when British universities were chasing short-term student recruitment targets, we had all the confidence of youth to plan a thirty-year project that would establish a new generation of glass artists in China, and a new kind of creative and academic dialogue and community across and beyond our respective cultures.

That project is still only twelve years old, and Glass Routes offers an interesting opportunity to observe its development to date.

Two significant features of this show chart firstly the creative legacy of Keith Cummings, as an artist and teacher, over four decades; and secondly new development in contemporary Chinese glass, in the work from Shanghai and Tsinghua universities, whose department heads, Xiaowei Zhuang and Guan Donghai - already established artists in their own fields - took Masters programmes in glass at Wolverhampton.

Glass Routes is configured in three rooms, preceded by an ante-room exhibiting research projects at Wolverhampton, including work by Gillian Burdett and Xue Lu, and Max Stewart’s research on Amalric Walter. Keith Cummings’ influence on research in Art & Design at Wolverhampton is, to my mind, inestimable and far-reaching, as these three very different projects prove by virtue of the range and depth of inquiry into glass as both material and application over many years.

In the first room, Cummings’ own work is shown alongside that of significant artists, such as: Professor Ronald Pennell and also established artists who were Keith’s students at Stourbridge like Catherine Hough, David Reekie and Colin Reid.

The second room offers up an extraordinarily diverse range of glass artefacts in jewellery, architecture, textile, product, installation and craft applications, all in their various individual ways deriving something distinctive, a shade or influence, from the enormous generosity of Cummings’ teaching. There are direct parallels between the Wolverhampton and this year’s British Glass Biennale – for example I would point to work by Ruth Spaak and Vanessa Cutler, and by Joanna Manousis, a very recent (2007) Wolverhampton graduate, in particular.

The third room is dedicated to contemporary work from Shanghai and Beijing – work that continues to register and redefine both the international reach and influence of glass at Wolverhampton and the extraordinary generosity of Keith Cummings’ achievement in teaching and research, and as an artist and an author, in particular.

Guan Donghai’s exemplary work gives a flavour of this. City Gates – his first solo glass sculpture exhibition at Gaffer Studio Glass, Hong Kong, in 2006 marked, in itself, an important threshold in his work, and witnessed his extraordinarily rapid development as a contemporary glass artist: from his first engagement with the material of glass hardly seven years ago, to the distinguished and original body of work then showing.

That the theme of Guan Donghai’s first solo show should have been one of gateways and as points of entry and exclusion, came as no surprise. In the wider international context of contemporary glass art, these were works that withstood as much as they contained. The gate pieces are portals or door spaces whose absent frames span thresholds both admitting us to a distinctively Chinese contemporary glass domain, and resisting everything which is merely derivative of elsewhere. The imagined civic dimension to these objects, artefacts that otherwise function essentially on a domestic scale, is also notable – in the absent form of the vanished or metonymic ‘invisible cities’ to which these gates preclude our admission.

That Guan Donghai’s city gates lock the intruder without, and the mystery within, seems fitting - in cultural terms invoking ideas of power, protection, seclusion, and isolation. They explore practical notions of limit, including the self-imposed confinement or limitation to a rough suite of simple glass forming processes. But these are modern artefacts, albeit inscrutable as the past, offering playful resistance to received ideas or hack journalese perspectives on China, ancient and modern.

The coarse rendering of the glass fabric seems also fitting - these are raw sand - and kiln-cast forms that display highly developed surface and colour sensibilities. Guan Donghai works here for a finished quality that he calls unsophisticated but which in fact betrays, beyond his intensive engagement with glass technique, a sustained artistic and technical foundation in textile design, watercolour painting, and touch-perfect draughtsmanship that practically guarantees such qualities.

The gates are variously studded and chequered with squared and rounded bosses, they involve occasional galleries, windows, archways and doors. Their forms are as contained as carved stamps, or the grid squares in which children practice writing characters in the Chinese world. From time to time archaic heads within the gate form confront the viewer - are those figures sentries, or severed trophies, betokening vigilance or warning? These are works that require no explicit narrative, whose significance is tacit, implicit, and whose condition appears to rest sufficient unto itself.

The forms of the Weapon Series similarly take their bronze and jade ceremonial antecedents into a new architectural order – as scaled-down, intimate models of potentially monumental forms that continue to employ the mould-casting and cold abrasive technologies that gave form to their ancient precedents. They appear monumental in the sense both of their significance and intensity, and in the memorial sense – playful by turns – that marks the idea of a lost civilisation or the bright technical evidence of some obscure though highly developed ritual and craft culture. At the same time, it is clear that the works concerned are not merely derivative of some shallow process of cultural archaeology or historical appropriation, for these intensely tactile, textured and chromatic objects are to my mind haunted by a kind of creative ambivalence.

That ambivalence, if such it is, might appear inseparable from two related biographical details: that 1966, the year of Guan Donghai’s birth, in Mudanjiang (Heilongjian Province, in North East China), was also the year in which Mao Zedong launched, on May 16th, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976); and that – as a detail picked out in his short brochure note for the Gaffer Studio Glass artists’ catalogue testifies – as a five-year-old, he took primary school pride in having been with his father to Tiananmen Square in Beijing; to the gate of heavenly peace.

And so the child of the Cultural Revolution has become the artist whose fresh glass oeuvre recalls and re-works, in a contemporary idiom, past forms, past references, formal research, deriving from antique jade, bronze or stone artefacts, and the ritual, military and craft cultures from which they trace their formal genealogies. Objects and practices which, throughout that traumatic decade, the makers of the Cultural Revolution attempted to consign to the waste-skip of imperial history.

The gate and weapon pieces seem monumental also insofar as any figurative human element is always held subservient, in scale and definition, as a small architectural detail of the broader design. For instance, in the disembodied head motif that figures as antique human presence, a windowed inlet within the sword blade section (for example Weapon Series, #1 and #2). Or in Régime, a glass rail cast from a length of H-section steel girder, onto which are threaded cast head-forms in semi-opaque glass, complete with top-knots, their identical faces stained with red, blue, white and black oxide pigments.

Each head is bonded at the neck to a horizontal C-section runner in opaque pâte-de-verre, locked in serried rank like vitreous commuter counterparts, for the machine-age, of the terracotta warriors at Xian. It is interesting to compare this approach to figuration with the work of the English glass artist, David Reekie, another brilliant draughtsman, with whose work Guan may be familiar. In both cases, we witness precision, formal elegance, subversive humour, cryptic games, the stark portrayal of the human condition, with all the terse immediacy of a newspaper cartoon or an epigram. But in Régime, for example, every trace of the individual drama that Reekie characteristically explores is expunged, and a different kind of political sensibility shows itself as an unblinking preoccupation with the forms of power. I look forward to the new direction this single work may inaugurate.

Guan Donghai’s sculptural language involves a high degree of plastic imagination, careful attention to surface qualities, a rich chromatic sensibility, technical mastery, and a keenly observant sense of Chinese artisan tradition in terms of architectural detail, and ancient techniques of bronze and jade manufacture. It can be playful, capable of humour or political nuance, and is confident, measured and contained.

Guan Donghai’s work is exemplary in both senses of that word, but in similar terms, all of the new glass from Shanghai and Beijing can speak for itself, in its own idiom, and bears the first remarkable fruit of a collaboration that I trust and believe will continue to evolve for many years to come.


Andrew Brewerton,
Visiting Professor of the University of Plymouth,
Honorary Professor of Fine Art at Shanghai University

Glass Routes 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