Revolver

One of the great challenges of working with glass is finding interesting raw material to work with.
Stained glass artists are fortunate in that they have hundreds of beautiful jewel like colours to choose from at their fingertips.
However I have always enjoyed the challenge of using something like industrial safety glass or Georgian wire as in this example.I find that this kind of glass has a resonance for me as I can still remember those buildings in operation with smashed or cracked windows on their outer skin.
Its not easy to work with but it usually has an interesting character due to its past life as part of a factory or industrial workshop.
When the Greenock shipyards were being torn down I managed to salvage a huge amount of this glass ,which usually involved crawling through skips of rubbish to retrieve it!
I also managed to collect some of the small square slabs of glass that filled the cast iron frames of the sugar shed windows.
Throughout Absent Voices I will be conducting glass making workshops where I will introduce people not only to colourful decorative glass ,but also the raw material that I salvaged from those rubbish skips years back!