EMOTIONAL HOOPS

A series of ten works in painted, enamelled and stained handmade glass

This series grew out of a long admiration for crewel embroidery — its patience, its rhythm, the way it builds a world of colour and texture stitch by stitch.

The works explore what happens when those qualities are translated into glass: a medium that shares embroidery's devotion to surface and detail, but which adds the entirely different dimension of light moving through colour. The two art forms have more in common than you might expect — both are slow, both are tactile, both reward close attention — and yet the conversation between them keeps throwing up surprises.

Each of the ten hoops is a separate piece with its own character and its own name, worked in handmade glass using a combination of painting, enamelling, staining and sandblasting. The steel hoops that frame them are polished and patinated by hand.

They are modest in scale but not, I hope, in ambition. These are pieces made to be lived with — to catch the light differently on a winter afternoon than they did in summer, to offer something new each time you pass them.

As part of their 25th Anniversary celebrations, The Contemporary Glass Society worked in partnership with The Makers Guild in Wales to respond to the title FLOW …of glass, of ideas, of creativity, of movement (e.g. physical in the making process, movement of material…) FLOW – to move steadily and continuously in a current or stream. FLOW state – being in the zone, a mental state in which a person performing an activity (such as making) is fully immersed, a feeling of hyper focus, intense, leading to a sense of ecstasy and clarity. The exhibition ran in Cardiff 2 APRIL - 29 MAY 2022 featuring Nour El Huda Awad, Carolyn Basing, Chris Bird-Jones, Jacky Edwards, Mark Fenn. Trish Goodbody, Amber Hiscott, Pratibha Mistry, Paul Mitchell, Linda Norris, Kate Pasvol, Nicholas Rutherford, Anna Selway, Cathryn Shilling, Phillipa Silcock, Amelia Skachill Burke.

All pieces are available in my shop Rachel Phillips Glass-Shop — Rachel Phillips Glass