Four winners of Amanda Moriarty Prize 2024

Thanks to the huge generosity of Richard Glass from Teign Valley Glass (TVG), we have not one but four lucky winners of the CGS 2024 Amanda Moriarty Memorial Prize.

Four applicants made the shortlist to win a five-day residency at the Devon studio, but Richard Glass kindly decided to provide each of them with the prize!

The winning artists are Emma Baker, Theo Brooks, Laura Kriefman and Maria Zulueta.

Based on a farm in Somerset, Emma Baker has worked with glass for over 10 years. Her inspiration comes from the events experienced throughout life; why are some moments profound and others unmemorable? Partnered with a passion for learning and understanding the material, her works explore materiality with a sentimental narrative.

During the residency, her aim is to produce a new body of work of blown glass pieces that show the documentation of how glass behaves when an imbalance of heat occurs due to the introduction of colour.

Emma commented, “I’m incredibly excited to be a recipient of this prize and hugely grateful for the generosity of TVG and CGS.”

Theo Brooks is a British Cypriot glass maker from London. Brooks’ contemporary reinventions of important ancient Cypriot artefacts as sculptures and installations is his passion and his way of representing his culture. Alongside this, he blends his two cultures into the aesthetics of his objects, taking visual inspiration from growing up in south London.

Brooks wishes to expand on a current body of work by experimenting with new forms and pieces, with the assistance of the TVG team. He is excited to make connections within the glass community and honour the spirit of the memorial award.

Laura Kriefman is an award-winning choreographer and artist with over 20 years’ experience obsessing about movement and colour. Her work has been featured worldwide, including at the Venice Biennale, and she has been awarded numerous prestigious international fellowships. Now moving into a career as a professional stained glass artist working at industrial and ‘art’ scale, Laura is reflecting her love of colour and movement into the flow and precision of glass work (see main image). She is aiming to learn to make contemporary roundels and blown sheet glass, moving past the classic stained glass artist’s understanding of glass and into a hybrid place of being able to make her own sheet glass.

Maria Zulueta’s dedication to promoting excellence in glasswork has been unwavering as an artist, educator, researcher and practitioner. Specialising in kiln-formed glass, casting and printing techniques, she engages in a continuous exploration of materials and processes with intuition and curiosity. During the residency, she aims to blend traditional craft elements with modern artistic expression, using hot glass, casting and Pate de Verre to create visually stunning and conceptually rich sculptural pieces inspired by nature and human relationships, with a focus on change and ecological awareness.

All of the winners will be writing up their residency experiences in due course.

The Amanda Moriarty Prize was set up in 2017 to commemorate Amanda Moriarty, a long-serving Board member and Honorary Treasurer of the CGS, who passed away. To celebrate her enthusiasm and encouragement of glassmaking, CGS offers this annual prize in her memory.

Main image: Detail of ‘Framed on a Train’ by Laura Kriefman.