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Once again, Contemporary Glass Society (CGS) is pleased to announce the launch of this year’s Amanda Moriarty Prize. This will reward the winning CGS member with a five-day residency at Teign Valley Glass.

In 2017, Amanda Moriarty, a long-serving Board member and Honorary Treasurer of the CGS, passed away. To celebrate her enthusiasm and encouragement of glassmaking, CGS offers an annual prize in her memory.

For the 2024 prize, CGS is delighted to be working with Richard Glass and his team at Teign Valley Glass, who have generously donated a five-day residency in their studio. This will enable the winner to extend their practice with the assistance of this experienced team. The prize is open to all CGS members at all levels and at all stages of their careers. It presents a fantastic opportunity to step back, take time and explore your potential in a well-equipped studio, alongside established makers.

The aim will be to develop original ideas, progressing experiments through to the creation of a new piece of work or project. This can be made in hot glass, lampworking, cold shop or sand-blasting techniques, or a combination of them. Teign Valley Glass would like to retain a test piece from the residency for inclusion in their museum.

Teign Valley Glass is located in Bovey Tracey, Devon, UK, on the edge of Dartmoor, in a beautiful old pottery.  It provides extensive glass-working facilities within its hot shop and cold working shop, with the support of a dedicated team to foster individual creative growth and expertise.

As part of the prize, CGS will also pay £300 towards accommodation/travel during the residency.

Applications will be shortlisted to four. Shortlisted artists will be interviewed by Zoom by members of Teign Valley Glass and the CGS Board. The three unsuccessful shortlisted applicants will all be offered the opportunity of spending a day making their work at Teign Valley Glass.

Deadline for applications: 15 April 2024

The winner will be announced in early May 2024.

For more information and to apply, click here.

If you are not yet a member of CGS, why not join here to apply for this and future opportunities?

Read about the residency experience of the winner of the 2022 Amanda Moriarty Prize, Pratibha Mistry, here.

Image: Glassblowing at Teign Valley Glass.

Pratibha Mistry was the winner of the 2022 Contemporary Glass Society (CGS) Amanda Moriarty Prize, providing her with five days of glassmaking experience at The Glass Hub, based in Wiltshire, with tutors KT Yun and Helga Watkins-Baker. Now she has completed her residency, read on to find out about how this valuable training went.

The Prize is awarded in memory of Amanda Moriarty, a long-serving CGS board member and Honorary Treasurer, who sadly passed away in 2017. It is a competition that enables one CGS member to achieve something unique and is available to established artists and up-and-coming makers, with the aim of promoting contemporary glass in the wider art world. The Prize enables one glass artist to fulfil a creative ambition or add to their technical skill set – a dream that would not be possible without this prize.

Pratibha Mistry is an MA graduate in Glass from UCA (Farnham), experienced in design making and with expertise in kiln-formed glass and cold working, focussing on biology-inspired installations.

She explained the background to the work she wanted to create at The Glass Hub: “Studying the mechanisms of mammalian disease at a molecular and intracellular level shaped my early scientific career. Revealing and probing these beautiful internal structures (mitochondria, golgi, nuclei, etc) left a lasting impression. To me they symbolise acceptance and resilience; we are all fundamentally made of the same stuff, we even accept when these constituents fail us and result in disease. I love to bring elements of these structures into my work and celebrate the unity we have with the natural world.”

Therefore, the residency focused on creating an experimental body of work to bring these microscopic structures to the forefront and relay the power of these organelles to transform life and contribute to human uniqueness.

“The residency allowed me the freedom to combine techniques such as pâte de verre, lampworking and casting with hot glass approaches,” Pratibha commented.

KT and Helga also benefitted from the experience, saying they looked forward to these residency days, as they gave them an opportunity to think outside of the box.

Here Pratibha describes her journey to create the new body of work, called ‘Orbs of Acceptance’:

 “On an icy January morning in 2023, I embarked on my first day at The Glass Hub. I received the warmest of welcomes! I was incredibly excited by this fantastic opportunity and we spent the first few hours drinking tea discussing ideas and how best to approach them. It was abundantly clear that both Helga and KT have a combined wealth of expertise and were open to innovative, experimental approaches.

“The Hub itself is a well equipped educational making place. By late morning I had started learning some basic lampworking skills with hard (borosilicate) and soft (Effetre and Glasma) glass stringers and rods. I soon learned how to control and exploit their properties.

“The afternoons were spent in the hot shop exploring methods to apply pre-made pâte de verre pieces onto hot little ‘orbs’ and blowing onto plaster models. The subsequent residency days continued in the same vein, combining pâte de verre structures, lampworked pieces and painting with stringers onto hot glass. Being an artist focused on kiln-based work,  it was insightful and valuable exploring these approaches.

“I also had the opportunity to cast cell-like structures and grow my coldworking skills. Who knew I’d enjoy the diamond saw so much! I made numerous pieces during the residency, each adding to my learning and allowing me to trial new, experimental colour combinations.

“Aside from the brilliance of The Glass Hub, both Helga and KT offered me the flexibility I needed to complete the residency, with plenty of reflection time between sessions. This really helped me get the best out of the residency and it also worked with the Hub’s busy workshop schedule and my busy life schedule.

“I am incredibly grateful for the growth opportunity both the CGS and The Glass Hub have afforded me. I feel I have developed a new confidence in my glass practice and I’m excited by the endless possibilities glass presents. It’s a phenomenal medium, supported by phenomenal people!”

KT and Helga added, “Pratibha was a joy to work with and really inspired us. The whole experience was an absolute pleasure. We wish Pratibha all the best in her next venture; her talents and creative style will always shine through.”;

CGS is grateful to The Glass Hub for kindly gifting the five glassmaking days in support of this prize. Anyone wishing to explore techniques in glass or interested in future residencies at the Glass Hub (subject to gaining funding) can find out more via www.theglasshub.co.uk

See more of Pratibha Mistry’s work via: www.pratibhamistryglass.co.uk

Main feature image: An organoid imprint created by Pratibha during her residency. All photos by the artist.

There is no doubt that Simon Moore is driven in everything he does. Having built his first wood-fired pottery kiln at age 14 to running a thriving glass studio today, his unerring commitment to creating production glass for businesses is the foundation of his success. However, he worries that students today are not able to benefit from the sort of educational and training mix that was the basis of his career. Linda Banks finds out more.

Simon Moore describes himself as a “production handmade glassmaker”. He is proud of this title, which he believes encompasses his hard-won skills of repetitive making, building accuracy and speed, which have enabled him to found and maintain a sound and profitable business. His aim is never to have products sitting on his shelf unsold.

Though Simon went to art school, he deliberately does not call himself an artist, as he does not believe this term justifies his broader abilities. In fact, he took a year out of formal education to train at the Glasshouse in Long Acre, Covent Garden, in 1979.

As experienced glassblowers know, it takes time to learn the basics and the ‘haptic’ knowledge necessary to be proficient in glassmaking. He recognised that hard work would be needed if he wanted to make a successful career with glass. He comments, “I had just enough skill, but, importantly, the right aptitude to gain more. I often worked 14 hours a day and was paid £45 per week.”

Simon knew that he had to be totally committed to learn this trade through working long days, learning how to fill the furnace and seeing how a workshop runs. He also benefitted from training in the exacting skills of making the same piece over and over again, watching the talented glassblowers there, especially gaffer Ronnie Wilkinson, of Whitefriars fame.

When he was a student at the then West Surrey College of Art and Design (now UCA Farnham), Simon acknowledges that he was fortunate to be immersed in an atmosphere of keenness to make, surrounded by workshops for ceramics, metalwork and jewellery for inspiration and with the support of tutors like Annette Meech, Ray Flavell and Stephen Procter.

However, he believes that colleges today are not investing in the teaching of glassmaking so that students can leave with enough ability to work in the real world. He says, “The colleges are teaching what they perceive as art because they describe themselves as art schools. They are not looking for students with aptitude. Nor are they looking for students with talent and ambition, either. For them I think it’s all about getting ‘bums on seats’. The job of an educator is to extend the student, to understand ambition and help the student achieve it, but I don’t feel this is happening now.

“I myself taught at art school for many years and loved it. But I became increasingly aware that courses were teaching not how to make an idea happen, but how to think about how it happens. If you have a good idea and can’t make it yourself then you use glass makers like James Maskrey or Louis Thompson. But as we all get older, where will the next generation of glass masters come from?

“What makes me anxious today is the lack of decent glassmaking assistants. They are just not out there any more. Glass making needs a physical, hands-on approach. Yes, every object needs a good idea driving it and of course the intellectual side is important, but there also has to be a physical, hands-on approach. I’d much rather be able to manufacture that idea and create income than just write about it. The academic approach over the last few years is stifling physical making.

“I became disillusioned with teaching when I was told that we could not fail anyone; that was the end for me. My 37 years of experience in the field and ability to recognise real aptitude for a career in glassmaking – or lack of it – apparently counted for nothing. The world of academia is so different to the world of professional and commercial practice.”

Following on from his intensive work experience and subsequent employment at the Glasshouse, Simon proceeded to co-found the Glassworks studio with Steven Newell and Catherine Hough, in order to produce innovative glassware.

For him, it has always been about the ability to make the same item to the same high standard and precision, over and over again, that has appealed, and he is proud that he can make the same decanter for a client today that he made five years ago.

Over the course of his career Simon has travelled and worked abroad extensively, feeding his knowledge and building influential contacts. “To be a good glassmaker, you have to keep learning all the time,” he emphasises.

However, he does not see the drive necessary for success in many students graduating today. “They don’t have the patience or the 100% commitment required. They really have to want to do it and understand the level of dedication it takes to learn. You can lead a horse to water but can you make it drink? In their turn, the students must keep the pressure on the colleges to give them access and practise their skills with commitment – a couple of hours a week is not enough!

“The colleges need to be more rigorous in choosing students with the right attitude and aptitude – and then give them enough access to the hot shop to practice and fail and learn from their mistakes. There needs to be much more careers advice and discussion of business methods, preparing students for the real world. It is up to the students to demand a return on their £9,000-a-year investment if they don’t feel they are getting value for money from their courses.”

Simon’s own determination to be successful in the glass world led him to take on design directorships at Salviati in Murano and Dartington Crystal in Devon, before setting up his own workshop in London. His studio has made chandelier arms for the Palace of Versailles and glasses for Bombay Sapphire, plus he has collaborated with Anish Kapoor and Nicole Farhi to make handcrafted collections.

So, does he think the contemporary glass scene is still viable? Simon says he still has hope: “I think we still have just enough resources to rekindle some parts of a derelict tradition. We live in cycles; we reinvent. It’s time for the teaching of craft to be reinvented. Let’s get back to making. We need one very good handmade glass course that sets the standard.”

He concludes, “I just want students today to have the opportunities that I did.”

Main image: Simon Moore making a large ‘Grid Vase’ at the Kings Cross workshop.

Simon has opened the debate on glass education and welcomes your thoughts, whether you are an educator, student or someone who appreciates contemporary glass. Email us with your views via: editor@cgs.org.uk