Will has been selected to showcase his work for Make Southwest, formerly the Devon Guild. He’s created a new range especially for the exhibition, and here he talks about the thought processes behind creating something new.
“My brother lives down in Devon, so I drive down there a lot and you’ll notice the soil in Devon is really red. This rich-coloured landscape grows in your mind when you’re not driving through it. The red soil was what I first thought of when I was asked to make a range for this exhibition, but lots of ideas merge together when you create something new.
I spent a lot of time on Tresco years ago, and that’s when I started colour-banding – painting stripes using water colours that merge into each other. I’m loving the sunrises and sunsets at the moment work and I’ve been filling my notebooks with colour-banding of sunset and sunrise shades. Mainly yellows, pinks and oranges over darker, deeper colours.
When I am blowing, I tend to use a darker red as a background, and then every piece of glass becomes the physical sketch. I really enjoying making all these different pieces in different colourways, but with one idea in my head. It’s liberating for me to focus on one thing, while allowing myself to explore the idea.
My favourite objects are heavy. I think we’ve been brought up thinking glass is really fragile, but I like the idea of throwing your keys into a glass dish and knowing it will survive. The heft of the glass and the fact that you can see through it is what I love. Semi-translucent and a piece that feels really good in the hand. I like trying to get all the curves right – I guess I could spend the rest of my life trying to get that right.
Last year I started a range focusing on the Quantocks, but I felt that I hadn’t properly explored it, so I’ve revisited that. I look at the trees and the ivy and see the ways the trees look gnarly and what I find really special are the spaces between the ivy and the tree.
This time around I’m focusing more on the bottom of the trees, so some of the pieces in this exhibition are from a range I’ve called Roots.
There are two halves of this exhibition. One side show pieces that are asymmetrical, where I’ve really had to stop trying to make them “right”, and then the opposite; forms that have a symmetry. I’m enjoying the juxtaposition.
When the pieces finally go off to an exhibition it all feels a little strange. I find it hard to make a piece of glass that has to be “good”. You have to put some soul into it. Then at some point you have to look back and decide if it’s good enough. I find it quite frightening to put a body of work out there and leave it for others to decide if they like it or not. I make things that are important to me – that have a provenance and an emotional connection to my life.
It's unusual. No copying. No trends. Just important to me. That’s why my work can be quite ‘Marmite-y’.
I still think it’s important to make something that talks to people so I’m humbled and honoured when people buy the work I make.
I don’t take it lightly. It should give them pleasure. A connection – when someone see something in it and can make that connection, then that’s pretty awesome for me.”
Find out more about the exhibition and Meet the Maker session on Saturday, November 30th, here: https://makesouthwest.org.uk/all-activity/maker-showcase-will-shakspeare