Archives: Artists

At the moment I’m doing a lot of traditional glass painting and some casting, using mainly Bullseye glass. I’m also honing my cold-working techniques.

Virus pandemics aside, I mainly teach week day and weekend courses. I love sharing my passion for glass with other people and showing them how to make beautiful things too!

I also make gorgeous glass giftware, which I sell from the studio, through my website, https:\www.gorgeousglassgifts.co.uk
and also on Etsy, at
https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/GorgeousGlassGifts

If you’re interested in booking a class in stained glass, glass fusing, casting or glass appliqué, have a look at our main website, https://www.creativeretreatsandholidays.co.uk

My practice is driven by a search for expression of ideas and personal narratives but in the course of which I have come to refine several key kiln-forming techniques that I consider to bear a distinctive individual stamp. My artistic language involves the use of found forms or textures transposed into strange contexts using mould-making and transfer processes
I am perhaps known for the large-scale glass constructions such as The ‘Brickman figure” in the V and A Museum, made in what I describe as ‘Glass patch-working”. In this method I am slump forming large sheets of Artist glass that are then cut up, edge-worked and stitched together using metal wire or links. These works are very time consuming to complete and today are mostly reserved for commissions or special exhibitions, but as an offshoot I run a number of workshops where recycled sheet glass and bottles becomes the raw material for collage and larger scale sculptural form building
The other process that I have pioneered and refined is the use of cores or negative forms in casting. This technique is featured in Angela Thwaites’s Mould Making for Glass (pub A.C Black 2012) and involves the pre-casting of a core form that is suspended within a wax outer form that becomes the outside skin of the glass block. This method enables the viewer to perceive ‘two forms in one” and creates a conversation in symbolism and spatial relationship that is unique to the medium of cast glass.

My work is mainly experimenting with different techniques from drop moulds to bowls of different shapes and sizes. I have undertaken commissions for Trophies and objects d’art. See: www.valeriemcwilliams.co.uk

I make jewellery, knit and bead in wire, use art clay and know what I want to create in glass – fusing, slumping, casting and big beads
2015 kiln carving and needle felting.

We have installed a 7m high glass Foucault Pendulum in a School in Lincolnshire: it swings above an entrance hallway, using a laser to trace the arc on a world map on the floor.

Stained Glass commissions including contemporary and period reproductions; conservation and restoration for private and public buildings.
Recent work includes extensive conservation and restoration of Stained Glass at Leicester Cathedral.