DegreeART inFOCUS
INTERVIEW WITH GINA LANGRIDGE
GLASS HORSE HEAD 2012, hand blown glass sculpture, 18 x 33 x 14 cm, £500.00
Can you tell me more about the process of your work? My work is created using traditional glassblowing techniques and tools. To make the horse heads, I first created the head as a clay sculpture, which took many hours. I then made a plaster mould of it to blow hot glass into. The glass is blown into the mould and takes the shape of the horse head, and is hollow. Then it is cracked off the blowing iron and cools slowly over roughly 12 hours. The opening at the neck is then ground flat on a grinding wheel and smoothed with diamond pads until it isn’t sharp anymore, and the whole of the outside of the piece is sandblasted to achieve the frosted look and enhance the details. The whole process to create one small horse head can take about a week. Both colour and nature seems to be a strong influence within your work? Could you describe this more? Nature is my greatest inspiration, especially
horses and wild creatures such as stags and hares. I feel that people can relate to animals and that featuring them in my work helps to evoke deeper emotions from viewers of my work. Colour is very important because it can act both as decoration and to enhance the themes within a piece. The colours used for the horse heads were chosen because they are playful and contemporary, adding a dreamlike surrealist quality to each piece rather than trying to be a realistic interpretation of a horse’s head. What new developments have you found through experimenting with the materials and different techniques? Glass making has endless possibilities, once you grasp the basics of shapes and colour application you can play around with it in any way you can think of! I really enjoy making pieces that are purely decorative as well as my more sculptural work, and seeing how different colours react together. I have recently started incorporating gold leaf elements into my work and trying differ-