There’s an art to glass

THE eye-catching properties of glass have attracted us for hundreds of years. Whether high on a church window or lying on a beach, a piece of coloured glass always invites a closer look.

Anyone fascinated by the beauty of glass need look no further than York this month when two artists will be inviting people in for a view of their colourful world.

Ann Sotheran and Suzanne Dekker are two very different artists, both working with glass, selected to open up their homes and put their work on show for this year’s York Open Studio weekends.

Ann’s work is based on centuries of tradition and years of apprenticeship under one of York’s most regarded stained-glass-window makers, Harry Harvey. She has provided richness and inspiration for those who visit the churches for which she makes stained-glass windows, and added to people’s homes with her windows, panels and glass pictures.

Ann says her love for working in glass lies in it being something you can easily do, without a huge capital investment, with a few simple hand tools, in a small space at home, and still achieve sophisticated results quickly.

“I have enjoyed making things since I was young,” she says. “I was a Blue Peter child.”

Still enjoying making her own work, she sources, cuts, paints, etches and stains all the glass herself and incorporates different types of glass, techniques and textures that her 30 years of experience have taught her will work.

She loves to master colour.

“Colours in glass are very rich and pure. There is such an infinite range, an extremely wide palette. I like the way they change through the day, and have a different effect at different times of day,” she says.

Commissioned to make windows for churches, schools and homes around the country, Ann puts her success down to her training with Harvey, a leading contemporary stained-glass artist of his day. From him she learned the business skills of a professional, rather than just “playing around with glass”.

“I was going out on site, taking measurements, fitting the windows. We were not wasting any of the materials and we had to get it right first time,” she says.

Today she is a Fellow of the British Society of Master Glass Painters and one of only half a dozen stained-glass artists recommended by the Diocese of York.

She is especially proud of windows where she has felt she has been creative with her use of ideas, expressed through symbols and motifs. These include St Boniface’s in Bunbury, Cheshire; Ingleby Barwick Community College in Cleveland and Holy Trinity with St Mary’s in Berwick-upon-Tweed.

“I am a spiritual person, the world is a good place and we ought to live in it to make it a better place,” she says.

“When I make a window design I feel it should give people a spiritual uplift, it has to have some meaning to it, not just a pretty picture. It’s my job to incorporate things that give a spiritual message, that make you feel better when you look at it.”

She is proud to be adding a new contemporary light to a tradition which has carried on for centuries, and loves the feeling of continuity, which makes her feel ‘very rooted’.

“I like the fact it is a permanent thing, not ephemeral; it lasts.”

• Around York Ann’s work includes Heworth Methodist Church, St John the Baptist Church, in Easingwold and All Saints in Low Catton. Visit Ann for York Open Studios, April 12 to 14 and April 20 to 21, at 345 Burton Stone Lane, York, YO30 6EY yorkopenstudios.co.uk

SUZANNE DEKKER follows her heart. Inspired by nature, she remakes glass into sculptures which echo or mimic natural forms, working with recycled glass by trial and error until she finds a way to express her idea.

Her sculptures are simple and strange – sparkling feathers, glittering round birds’ nests, formations of leaves, twisted twigs and eerie chandeliers take on their own forms and seem to appear entirely natural.

Having come to glass less than ten years ago, she is already known for this distinctive art form and her work is sought after and sold by many galleries in Yorkshire.

She works entirely with recycled glass, old windows and coloured bottles, which she is given or finds. It is not unusual, she says, for her to be found with her head in a skip searching out new material.

“It is exciting. When I work with glass I lose myself, I lose the hours. In my workshop I’m just on autopilot, I’m just gone. Different pieces of glass react differently in the kiln, under different temperatures. When you don’t know what will happen the results are very exciting.”

Inspiration for her sculptures and glass pieces comes from the environment around her, the outdoors and nature, her visits to Shell Island, which she takes every year, and she says from an early age she always loved the sight of church windows.

She took her first lesson in glass at a day workshop run by Ann Sotheran. “That was it, I was absolutely addicted after I joined Ann’s night class. What I do now is all her fault,” says Suzanne, who then studied for a degree in 3D contemporary crafts.

Her work is influenced by personal experiences. Her feathers were inspired by the night her father died from cancer.

“Shortly before he died when I was sitting at the end of his bed I saw sparkly bits above his feet. I had been up all night and I thought it must be the reflection of a mirror or a car door from outside and I didn’t think any more of it.

“We are from a big family and we are Dutch, and his family said it must have been his soul leaving his body, the angels had come to get him.”

Part of her degree course asked her to design work for a setting of her choice and she decided she would like to make a bereavement suite for the hospital. Her experience of the room where she had been put to wait that night was that it was very stark, and very clinical, and smelt like a hospital.

Her thoughts about white light and angels led her to make a room with sparkling glass white feathers which rose through the air, to signify her ideas about white light and angels taking away her father’s soul.

These feathers have now become one of her signature pieces, and she makes them out of many colours. Nests followed, and for open studios this year she intends to fill the hallway with glass birds hanging from the ceiling to greet the people visiting her.

• See Suzanne’s work at Open Studios at 29 Eastfield Crescent, Badger Hill, York YO10 5HZ. Her work can also be seen at Art and Rose in Pocklington, Coast at Scarborough, The Dutch House at Crayke, and Newgate Gallery.