Lois Parker

I am a person who needs to work with hand and eye to make things - without that I grow dull and bore myself.  I work predominately with kiln formed glass- the glass is an awkward, contrary, challenging, brilliant and rewarding co-creator, making every process engaging and with an element of uncertainty.

The delight in working with glass is two-fold.  First, the process is both simple and direct and also technically challenging which keeps my interest and curiosity engaged.  The second is the way light is the third collaborator- glass pieces respond to lighting in a way few other media do.

I came to glass twice - once many years ago when I spent a week with Colin Reid learning to cast glass- I know how long ago it was as I drove my first car to hilly Stroud. I loved the medium and the processes, and planned to take up glass casting in my husband’s pottery kiln, but discovered the complex temperature needs of glass, particularly while cooling, would have meant controlling the kiln was difficult.  As it happens, a need for a glass window piece to avoid net curtains many year later brought me back to glass work, by which time computing had advanced so much that a plug-in kiln could do all that for me.

 I’ve noticed that there are two ways to deal with something that doesn’t come out right first time.  The first is to think, that hasn’t quite worked, and leave the project, and the other is to look at the project and immediately want to try several more ways of improving it.  With glass pieces I have an unquenchable curiosity about what would happen with, for example, a slightly different top temperature, and different way of layering the glass,  and alternative set of gravity/time/temperature settings to get a different shape.  There is always the lure of the not quite known to pull me on to the next project.  

Lockdown should have been very easy for me - I have a lovely studio in my backyard, I had adequate supplies, and no worries about homeschooling or unsafe working environments.  I found the anxiety did disrupt my normal ways of working, and I explored alternative media such as puppetry and textiles - the latter a return to a medium I used in the past.  Thanks to a collaborative project with my sister Joy Parker I got back into the pleasures of working with glass and am approaching my investigations with renewed vigour.

I’m continuing my exploration of aspects of the beach at Morfa Dyffryn (Series 1 available at Little Buckland Gallery), and developing new works using Pate de Verre to produce vessel shapes.  I am planning work that builds on the landscapes I know and see regularly and those I have missed using mixtures of processes to give textured and shaped panels and forms.