Thanks for all the fish

Nature presents such an amazing range of shapes and colours (to say nothing of behaviours) that it is impossible for a curious person not to be attracted. The challenge of capturing some part of that brilliance and storing it in a painting or sculpture must be hard to resist for those with the talent to do so. At the same time, the artist has to live – however meagerly – and nothing will separate the punters from their money better than some new kitsch for the pool room.

The world of glass animals is amazingly diverse and ranges from high art to dull mass production (and we are not talking here of an English indie rock band). The form is as old as the earliest discoveries of ancient glass, and as new as the hundreds of cheap Chinese knock-offs that grace the pages of ebay. There are at least two serious books, hardcover and large-format, on the subject of animals made in glass.

Australia’s populace clings close to the coastline, so it is not surprising that many artists in glass are similarly located. And it is not surprising that when they take inspiration from nature, they often turn to the sea and the creatures within it. The glass fish on this page are made by identifiable professional artists. Some are famous (including a couple of multiple finalists in the Ranamok Glass Prize), while others have enjoyed long careers in glass without much publicity or recognition from the critics. Still others started in glass artistry, only to move on fairly soon to other ways of making a living.

We start with a magnificent specimen of the artist’s imagination by John Lloyd and Geoff Murray. After working at Colin Heaney’s operation in Byron Bay, for a time from 1995 they operated a studio called “Lloyd Murray Glass” at Talofa on the road between Byron and Bangalow in northern NSW.

John Lloyd and Geoff Murray (NSW), undated

To head off any pedantry, I should note in advance that a dolphin is a mammal not a fish. But that is no excuse for excluding a work by the master of taking inspiration from the ocean, Colin Heaney.

Colin Heaney (NSW), 1993

The Sunshine Coast area north of Brisbane has housed a cluster of glass artists, at different times working in various business models and at various locations. These two specimens by Lucas Salton owe more to the Siamese fighting fish than anything living in the ocean nearby. Items such as these were regularly sold at the burgeoning Eumundi markets in the hinterland of Noosa Heads.

Lucas Salton (Qld), undated

Some glass artists have located themselves well away from major population centres. I suspect that decision reduced their turnover even more than it economised on the rent (or the distractions, or whatever induced the decision), but here are two outlying artists represented by their fish. Moshe Pleshet set up a glass blowing studio at Wyaldra near Mudgee in NSW in 1979 and made this specimen a year later. John Anthony was located near Airlie Beach in Queensland, although little more is known about him.

Moshe Pleshette (NSW), 1980

John Anthony (Qld), undated

South Australia has at least its share of makers of glass fish. Eamonn Vereker is perhaps the state’s best-known exponent of glass animals including fish, although we have not represented his output here.

With an impeccable artistic education in glass and considerable attention from the critics, Tim Shaw must regard his transplantation from the UK to the Adelaide Hills a success. Along the way, he made the gaping piscatorial specimen below.

Meg Caslake and David Pedler also operate a studio in the Adelaide Hills. I don’t know for sure that the clear glass starfish is theirs, but it seems of a kind with their other cast glass objects, including sea creatures. It was probably marked with a cellophane sticker that has since washed off in the ocean.

Bernard Stonor of Kangaroo Island spent 20 years making colourful objects from hot furnace glass before moving to lampwork in recent years. This flat-sided fish looks positively happy and clearly dates from the earlier part of his career.

Tim Shaw (SA), undated

Meg Caslake and David Pedler (SA), undated

Bernard Stonor (SA), undated

Another exponent of small animals in glass is James Dodson of Tasmania. His birds are particularly colourful, but here are two of his fish, looking angelic.

James Dodson (Tas), undated

To all these glass artists, we say: So long, and thanks for all the fish.

Stephen Skillitzi - Sculptor in glass

I’ve always had the motivation of a sculptor, rather than a vessel maker. I think that’s a fair statement, three dimensional, rather than utility. (Stephen Skillitzi, 2009)

Stephen Skillitzi (b. 1947) started his artistic life as a potter and discovered glass as an art form while at graduate school in the USA in the late 1960s. A training in ceramics was not an unusual background for those embracing the exciting new world of studio glass – the founder of the studio glass movement Harvey Littleton was a college professor in ceramics. When Skillitzi returned to Australia in 1970 and set about building himself a furnace and hot glass studio in Woolloomooloo, producing his first blown glass works in 1972, he was on the threshold of a new movement in this country.

Of course there was glass blowing in industry, which in places such as Leonora Lighting in Newcastle and Crown Corning in Sydney ventured into the decorative arts as they produced household items by hand and machine. There was also scientific glassware being made on a smaller scale, including one-off products for special purposes. Occasionally, workers from these industrial occupations would amuse themselves and others with unauthorised creations using the factory equipment and materials. But the new vision being imported from the USA was of a single artist working alone or with minimal assistance in a studio making items for the primary purpose of decoration or even artistic expression.

Stephen Skillitzi has had a long and productive career in glass. Starting out blowing bubbles of hot glass melted in a furnace, he has experimented and navigated his way through kiln work and casting, often combining parts made by different techniques into sculptural assemblages with overt political messages. He has also practiced street theatre in combination with his glass making, thus giving his political messages another dimension in which his work is closer to art than to decoration. His career is well documented, in a long interview in the National Library’s Eminent Australians program, in a more intimate interview by Wayne Pearson as part of PhD research, and in a long speech and essay by Skillitzi himself published in several forms including here.

Despite all these records in words, there is little accessible to document visually Skillitzi’s early works. Mostly these were made by blowing a bubble of furnace glass, and (in the examples on this page at least) can be described by their relation to a standard vessel shape such as the vase, bowl or platter. These items date from the 1970s, the first decade of Skillitzi’s four-and-a-half decades of engagement with studio glass in Australia.

The first example in vase form is 21.5cm high and has been described by one viewer as a “gothic rosebud”. It dates from the very earliest of Skillitzi’s glass making in Australia in 1972. Unusually, it glows under ultra-violet light, indicating a small content of radioactive minerals.

The next item is a bowl from 1978, which is 21cm at its widest. Despite its slightly irregular shape and decoration, it must be one of the more straightforward (and perhaps even potentially useful) vessels that Skillitzi has made.

Contrast the previous bowl with the following two pieces from 1977. The small bowl with its many ‘feet’ is 14cm at its widest. I’m not sure how it is made, although I suspect the feet are cut segments of a strap that are applied hot in a manner similar to the handle on a jug. This item shows Skillitzi as an assembler of sculpture in glass, in which he has not strayed far from his beginnings in ceramics. It also illustrates his self-description as a member of the “adder” sub-species of sculptors. (For the other kind, think of Michelangelo hacking away at a block of Carrara marble.)

 

The next item is a large open bowl or distorted platter from 1977 up to 37cm long. Its heaving irregularity in green and blue, with folds and foaming bubbles, has more than a little of the roiling ocean about it. That shape is not to be mistaken for a piece of utility glassware.

The example below from 1976 is another somewhat irregular blown vessel with applied feet, this time with thick partial casing around the bowl. This one is hefty, around 22cm high and weighing 2.5kg. Similar to a previous example in green, this one shows the artist working in glass while thinking like a potter. The possibilities for giving this one utility are the same as almost every “pot” produced in ceramics.

Another contrast is the vessel below from 1978, in which the lower section is a hexagonal star made in an open mold to achieve the shape. The top rim, however, clearly echoes the similar part of the preceding free-blown and assembled item. It could be used as a flower vase if the owner was so inclined.

After the 1970s, Skillitzi moved away from blown glass with its natural form of a vessel created when the bubble is opened out. He became a leading exponent of casting in glass, using the often figurative cast objects as components in assembled sculptures. Usually these sculptural works contained or were accompanied by a political message. In something of a return to the early days, in recent years he has been making large sculptures from blown glass elements, which nicely avoids the question of what kind of vessel shape is intended. The Adelaide gallery Art Logic has many of his recent works for sale.

He has also been political in a narrower sense, standing as the Climate Sceptics candidate in the 2010 federal general election in the division of Boothby, attracting 0.37% of the primary vote.

Chuck Simpson - Glass artist and personality

Chuck Simpson was a larger-than-life character with an enormous talent. He was born in 1944 in the USA and educated there. He worked in Australia as a high school teacher for many years before turning to glass. The studio of Colin Heaney at Byron Bay on the north coast of NSW was a hothouse of glass artistry in the mid-1980s, having started only a few years earlier. Chuck Simpson was one of the many who found their talents there.


The bottle in the first image is perhaps the earliest of his works we have for show. It is heavy-walled with green and gold in layers and with noticeable iridizing on the surface, and simply signed “Chuck”. (A possibly earlier item in the form of a simple spherical bowl signed “C. Simpson” was seen but not captured.)

Chuck Simpson, undated 16.5cm high

Other items he made at Byron Bay in the mid-to-late 1980s include a frizzy paperweight from 1986, a gourd flask in crimson and gold with surface iridizing from 1987, and a highly iridized silvery blue perfume bottle (with loose stopper) also from 1987. All three of these items are signed and dated, although only the gourd flask (a distinguished piece of ‘exhibition’ quality) is graced with his second name.

Chuck Simpson, 1986 9.5cm high

Chuck Simpson, 1987 17cm high

Chuck Simpson, 1987 11.5cm high

Two themes of Simpson’s work are already emerging in these early items. One is the extensive application of heavy metal salts to the hot glass to impart an oily iridescent sheen in likeness of ancient glass retrieved in archaeological digs. The other is the strongly indented sides on the stoppered bottle. More on both features later.

Chuck Simpson moved to New Zealand in 1987 and took over Tony Kuepfer’s studio at Inglewood, together with others including Lesley Justin (later to become Chuck’s wife), Andrew Williams and Joan O’Leary. This was perhaps the time his art developed most strongly and he was enormously productive, both individually and in works made jointly with Lesley. Even today, at any time on the NZ auction site TradeMe there is usually at least one Simpson piece for sale.

The examples below are typical of the simpler items they made at Inglewood in the period 1988-1990.  The first bowl is signed “Glass Art NZ” in what looks like Chuck’s school-teacher-ish handwriting. The second is signed “C+L Simpson” (again in Chuck’s writing), while the holey paperweight has “Chuck + Lesley Simpson” in what I think is Lesley’s hand. Note the generous iridizing and the development of indentations into holes.

The best accounts of the Simpsons in these NZ times are found on Stuart Park’s New Zealand Glass blog. In particular, don’t miss the blog item “Chuck Simpson Liked Perforated Glass".

Glass Art NZ, undated 12cm dia

Chuck and Lesley Simpson, undated 9.5cm dia

Chuck and Lesley Simpson, undated 8cm long

Chuck and Lesley moved back to Australia in 1990 and set up in the Sunshine Coast area north of Brisbane. Their two main locations were in the craft centre established by the Queensland Government in the old Ginger Factory at Buderim (mentioned also in the item about Peter Goss on this blog) and later in the space at the back of the Imperial Hotel in the main street of Eumundi that had earlier housed a brewery. At some stage along this journey, Lesley transformed herself into Indiah, although she continued to work as a glass artist jointly with Chuck. Their output was highly varied as can be seen in these examples. The large hot formed sculpture of mother and child from 1993 is characteristic of Chuck’s exhibition quality pieces of this time, while the decanter with stopper and the sculptural bowl on a duplex stem (both from the later 1990s and both signed “Chuck & Indiah Simpson”) are characteristic of the higher end of their production wares. The paperweight is fascinating, both for being large and heavy and for its inclusion of lampworked flowers. It is also signed as a joint work. Note again the perforations in both of the sculptural pieces.

Chuck Simpson, 1993 36cm high

Chuck and Indiah Simpson, 1999 34cm high

Chuck and Indiah Simpson, 1998 19cm high

Chuck and Indiah Simpson, undated 10.5cm high

A major feature of Chuck Simpson’s practice was his contribution to the community of glass artists, especially in fostering his workplace as an access studio where others could share the facilities to create their own works and the camaraderie of joint endeavour. The access studio is especially helpful in hot glass artistry where the equipment is expensive to buy and expensive to run. Even in the early days in Inglewood, other artists used the facilities for their own practice. The studio in the Buderim craft center was organized as a cooperative, another form of shared access. His business at Eumundi was known as Vesta Hot Glass, but he also operated as Queensland Glass Artists Association Inc. Under this latter banner he fostered other local artists such as Tina Cooper and Lucas Salton. He also organized a series of workshops at Eumundi, drawing the leading glass artists from around Australia and NZ, and reported the results widely through the Ausglass newsletters.

Sadly, Chuck Simpson died in 2001 of a condition almost certainly caused by his long-term exposure to hot glass and especially to the metal salts used in creating the iridized finish so characteristic of his work. Many other hot glass artists have suffered ill consequences of their working environment, including Indiah, formerly known as Lesley, who quit the business citing its poisonous effects.