Archives: Artists

My practice explores the relationship between my body, the landscape, and the viewer’s experience. Using the pâte de verre process, I create casts of my own body and place them within outdoor environments, creating unexpected encounters between body, nature, and place.

Nature is central to both my life and my work. I am drawn to creating pieces that are experienced outdoors because I feel most connected to the natural world, and many of my most meaningful experiences of art have taken place within the landscape. By situating my work outside, changing conditions such as light, weather, and season become active collaborators in how the work is encountered.

Using my own body as subject creates a direct physical connection between myself and the work. Through mould-making and casting, I transform fragments of my body into glass forms that exist independently within nature. Through these works, I explore themes of presence, absence, belonging, and transformation, inviting moments of reflection, curiosity, and discovery.

My work resides in the space between 2 and 3 dimensions. Working with glass is my passion in its hot form or cut and fused for architectural settings. Either installed in an aperture of a building or wall mounted, panels of low relief glass explore the light and darkness, celebrating the formation of the earth. I am currently working on several private commissions including a stained glass window for the newly refurbished Cullercoats Watch House, a building made famous by the paintings of Winslow Homer in the late nineteenth century.

My recent work has focused on exploring glass as both a material and an artistic medium. During my A-Level Fine Art studies, I completed a project titled An Exploration of Glass, where I researched contemporary glass artists from the UK and across Europe to develop my understanding of different approaches to making. Through observational painting and analysis of their work, I explored how artists use form, colour, light, and movement within glass. This research informed the development of my own pieces, encouraging me to reflect critically on my practice and identify new techniques and ideas that I would like to explore in the future.
Another significant project was Growth and Decay, which examined natural cycles of life and change. For this project, I created glass sculptures inspired by organic forms and the processes of development, transformation, and deterioration found in nature.
Alongside my studies, I have gained experience supporting exhibitions and events through E&M Glass, including assisting at exhibitions in Luxembourg and Ruthin Craft Centre. These experiences have strengthened my interest in galleries, exhibition-making, and curation, while also providing valuable insight into the presentation of contemporary craft. I also regularly assist in the studio, supporting the making process and developing my understanding of glassmaking techniques.

Jagoda Kamov’s recent work spans flat and sculptural glass. Her graduation piece, *A Sense of Place*, combines engraving, fusing and sandblasting on glass, with an interactive black-ink element: ink brushed across the surface settles into the engraved and sandblasted areas, so the image emerges as it is worked — a figure at the threshold of ancient ruins, exploring belonging and memory.

She has also completed her first glass sculpture, a small snake, extending her practice from two-dimensional panels into three-dimensional form.

Alongside her studio work, glass runs through her interdisciplinary practice in theatre and film, where she treats it as a material language of light, fragility and transformation.

Recent projects have included ‘happy accident’ pot melts, many craft fair items, and other small gift items.

Nature and flora have always been the soul of my artistic inspiration. A fleeting movement or a sudden apparition settles within me and sparks the creative process—much like a simple fruit transforming through natural drying. In my work, I explore the interplay of opposites: mass and fragility, a core and its protective shell, an imprint and its container. The heaviness of a solid block contrasts with the delicate resistance of a thin layer of glass. The shell holds the core, leaving a mark that reveals their shared essence. Rough and silky textures create striking contrasts, while a surprising play of polychromes produces an intensity of color that shifts and transforms with the light.

My practice is driven by materials, using a process of experimentation, technique development, and learning through making. Colour plays a central role in my work, helping to strengthen themes and push narrative possibilities. I draw inspiration from a wide range of creative disciplines, including fashion, architecture, brutalist design, nature, and everyday observations, allowing ideas to emerge through cross-disciplinary exploration. At the core of my practice are lampworked and blown glass alongside copper metalwork, which I combine to create sculptural, wearable pieces. The contrast between glass and metal reflects my interest in balancing fragility and strength, while the concept of containment is a recurring theme throughout my work, explored through form, structure, and the relationship between object and body. Influenced by the bold forms and raw honesty of Brutalism, I am drawn to strong silhouettes and structural elements that inform both the aesthetic and construction of my pieces. Through colour, material, and making, I create work that communicates stories, evokes emotion, and encourages engagement between the object, wearer, and viewer.

Finding inspiration in botanical forms, surface-pattern and the human figure, Alison Mac Cormaic employs mosaic to investigate the intersection between nature and culture. She uses Mexican smalti, a unique, handmade, opaque glass with a luminous natural resonance. Building on intuitive colour responses, her work explores the joyful juxtaposition of colour blocks, with the selection, matching and rearranging of elements always a significant element in her process. Exploring a strong agency of personal drawings and mark making, she creates work developed from observation, with a rapidly drawn line or contour often informing a whole mosaic.