Archives: Online Exhibitions

Work is for sale! Please contact members directly to purchase work.

The pandemic was a frightening and challenging period for us all. For many it meant illness and the loss of loved ones, for others loneliness and isolation. However, there were those for whom lockdown gave the opportunity to stop and review both their lives and their creative practice. Out of misery there came a flowering of ideas and new work.

We asked members if they were one of those able to create something new and interesting during lockdown. As we launch into a new year, our first online selling exhibition of 2023 offers an insight into this flowering where darkness turned to light.

It is fascinating to not only see what they made but also to hear about their experience behind it.

(An exhibition for CGS members only.)

“Holiday Heaven” Online Exhibition

2022 has been a fantastic year for contemporary glass! Not only has it been the International Year of Glass but the Contemporary Glass Society also celebrated its 25th anniversary. In addition, the International Festival of Glass was held at Stourbridge for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic.

To mark the Commonwealth Games being held in Birmingham in 2022, CGS decided to dedicate its exhibition at the Festival to the amazing countries and people of the Commonwealth. So over 100 glass artists took a magical mystery tour and produced postcards featuring the richness of countries ranging from Australia to Maldives, from New Zealand to Malta, from Singapore to Tanzania. Commonwealth countries are diverse – they are amongst the world’s biggest, smallest, richest, and poorest countries. We celebrated their sites, fauna and flora, sea world, agriculture, and industry and just their uniqueness in a small piece of glass holiday memorabilia.

Over 50 of these small and unique artworks from the original exhibition were sold but CGS still has a range of marvellous pieces which can be seen below.

All these Holiday Heaven pieces are for sale and looking for a home to fly to.

Please contact admin@cgs.org.uk if you are interested in becoming the proud owner of a piece of Commonwealth magic!

CGS is most grateful for the generosity of our sponsors for the event, Mark Holford and Alan J. Poole

(All work priced from £50 – £500) from 7^th November – 30^th Dec

The end of the year and Christmas is coming!  Celebrate what makes you happy and how you can spread joy through your work. “Access Happiness!” is an affordable selling show with accessible prices. (All work priced from £50 – £500).

Introduce others to an amazing range of special Christmas presents, inspire them to look at our gloriously unique work and enable them to support creative people at the same time.

Thank you to all those CGS glass artists that submitted work.

“The Human Condition”
5th September – 31st October. Then permanently in our Gallery area.

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So, what makes us human? What characterises the essentials of human existence from birth and continues throughout our lives?

We invited our CGS Members to ponder on birth, growth, emotion, aspiration, conflict and mortality or simply demonstrate through their glass what makes them who they are.

Celebrating their own personal condition to let their glass do the talking. They show us what they love, hate, fear and what they hope for.

We challenged our members to create work that is a celebration of the natural world in which we live – EARTH/ SEA/ SKY.

This response could take the form of:

· Combining different glass making techniques to create a new piece of glass work.

· Collaborating with another member who uses a different glass technique to create a joint piece of work.

· Combining different materials or found objects to create a new piece of glass work. (At least 50% must be glass.)

· Collaborating with another artist from a different discipline to create a joint piece of work in different materials. (At least 50% must be glass.)

(This exhibition features work that is not included in the London Glassblowing exhibition of the same name.)

4th July – 29th August

Stop and look up! Here is a chance to look to the stars, to view our universe from beyond Earth’s atmosphere. The study of Astronomy includes objects that we can see with our naked eyes, like the Sun, the Moon, the planets, and the stars but also includes objects we can only see with telescopes or other instruments, like faraway galaxies and tiny particles.

As an Astral being, use your imagination to create something from this world or form outer space. Dare to go where no-one has gone before…..

This was the theme that we asked CGS Member Glass Artists to respond to.

The show was launched on 2nd May – (27th June 2022).

“We are all increasingly concerned about the planet and our impact upon it. How do we live more sustainably especially as we work with a material that does little to help our carbon footprint?
This exhibition challenged glass artists worldwide to produce work using recycled glass in some form – this could be an empty wine bottle, old glass containers through to scrap glass that they would normally throw out.

We invited glass artists worldwide, to enter a CGS online selling show that responded to the above topic. We will be sharing the 48 artists on our socials over the coming weeks to highlight their work and inspiration.

If you have any questions about these gallery exhibitions, or taking part in our next shows, please email info@cgs.org.uk

This show was launched on the 7th March 2022.

All our shows from now on have the capability to be selling shows.

Buyers should please contact the artists directly.

GLASS NOW launched on the 17th January 2022, is the first online exhibition for 2022 and is part of the launch of the Contemporary Glass Society’s 25th anniversary celebrations.

The 50 Contemporary Glass Society artists featured in GLASS NOW are the personal choice of CGS Trustee Nicola Schellander together with Linda Banks, the Editor of Glass Networks Digital.

We wanted to feature artists whose work has fascinated and inspired us and who we feel make a statement about glass today; this is why we have invited these artists to take part.

We have not been able to include all members, as CGS has over 1000 artists! But we have put together a selection that we hope provides you with a representative overview of the techniques, variety of inspiration and excellence in the medium of glass.

Alongside this, we also wished to give you an overview of our worldwide reach as an organisation with a selection of international artists we are lucky to have in CGS as well as U.K. based.

Although all our CGS Trustees are practicing artists themselves, we have left them out of this show, to give you a more universal spectrum of CGS Member Glass Artists.

We hope that this exhibition will inspire you!

Don’t look now but Christmas is on the way! After last year’s successful “A is for Affordable” online exhibition we are returning with “A is for Affordable Part 2”.

57 glass artists have the opportunity to offer you beautiful glass at affordable prices. You can either purchase a piece of gorgeousness to either keep for yourself or to give as a gift.

This is a Selling Show at accessible prices. All work is priced from £50 to £500. All work is purchased directly from the artist.

The show will run from 13th November 2021 to 6th January 2022