Lindean Mill Glass 40

40 Li n d e a n M ill Gla s s

1978-2018

Copyright - c 2018 Gallery TEN, Edinburgh All Publishers Rights Reserved “Lindean Mill Glass 40” Annica Sandstrom & David Kaplan First Published in 2018 by Gallery TEN www.galleryten.co.uk www.lindeanmillglass.co.uk Designed by Paul Musgrove Created in Adobe - In Design Printed by DTP Edinburgh Cover: 300g Magno Satin Pages:170g Magno Satin Type set in Arial and Century Gothic Photographic copyright remains with the photographer, artists or gallery unless otherwise stated Page photo credits - to rear of catalogue Front & rear cover - detail ‘Ebb & Flow’ panel 2017 LMG

the glass work of

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A n n i c a S a n d s t r o m & Da v id K a p la n

introduction

A LIFE IN GLASS

by Amanda Game

In 1974 Glasgow historian John Hume photographed a series of derelict stone corn mill buildings on the banks of Ettrick Water in the Scottish Borders. His images, archived by Historic Environment Scotland (1) show a place in decline – rusting corrugated iron roofs; boarded-up windows; interiors filled with broken furniture and abandoned tools; grounds potholed and overgrown.

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Just four years later, in these same buildings, the first hot glassmaking furnace was lit and Lindean Mill Glass was born. Now, in 2018, the stone buildings are in pristine condition: carefully restored; set in beautiful gardens and they hum with both people and industry.

Lindean Mill has become associated not with grinding corn but with making high quality glass. This transformation lies in the hands of two exceptional artists and designers – one from USA one from Sweden – and is a testament to the importance of international exchange to Scotland’s culture and economy.

In 1977 Americans Darryle Hinz and David Kaplan and Swede Annica Sandström were looking for a place to live and work. David had studied for one year in the glass department at ECA under John Lawrie and both Darryle and David had completed their training at the legendary Orrefors Glass School in Sweden and decided to set up a glassmaking partnership. Both were employed at Boda Glass Factory making prototypes for their designers. Annica had also studied at the Glass School as part of her glass and ceramics course at the Konstfack School in Sweden. Annica and David had come across the abandoned mill when visiting friends in the Borders, and saw the potential of the site, and the buildings, for glassmaking – high roofs for managing the intense heat that is the byproduct of the hot shop; robust stone walls that could be fire resistant; space for living as well as working. Within a year the threesome, camping above the workshop and in a caravan had equipped and installed the studio so production (and income) could begin.

Darryle subsequently left the partnership in 1979 and moved to Denmark.

The first collection of twist-stem wineglasses with clear bowls in 1979 set the bar high for Lindean Mill Glass and its future success: well-designed, high quality glass tableware inspired by Swedish traditions enriched with the experimental verve of the studio glass movement that had been catalyzed in the 1960s by US artists such as Harvey Littleton and Sam Herman.

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The gradual restoration of the mill buildings continued over the following decade as David says ‘we conquered more space as our family grew’. Now there is not only a glass workshop and a glass stockroom and packing facility; but also an independent design studio; a gallery space; a spacious family home and two floors of offices for other local businesses. All bear witness to a working, and life, partnership that has weathered personal challenges and fluctuating fashions to maintain a glass studio with an unswerving commitment to elegant batch-produced, blown tableware with original designs still in production, and in demand, alongside regularly updated collections.

Lindean Mill Studio has worked with, and trained, twenty-five individuals over the years to assist them – many of whom, such as Stewart Hearn, Amanda Notarianni and Bibi Smit have gone on to found their own glass studios elsewhere. But the fundamental team has always been David and Annica – David the glass blower, the scientist, the athlete – Annica the rigorous designer, poet and colourist. Lindean Mill Glass is a synthesis of their material knowledge, sensuous intimacy, curiosity and years of shared hard graft.

This commitment to quality everyday objects also exists within the context of an artistically adventurous studio that has pushed the boundaries of complex glass processes like ‘graal’: a technique pioneered at Orrefors in the early 20th century in which layers of coloured glass are cased over one another. When cooled, a design or image is sandblasted and engraved into the surface and then the glass is reheated on the blowing iron and blown so the image extends and takes shape with the glassblower’s breath.

Some of the earliest Graal bowls created by David and Annica in the 1980s show blue female figures floating across a white ground – a sensuous dream like image that somehow captures the metaphor of the medium (fluidity, fragility) and the shifting imaginative world of the artist. Later, darker, more complex vessels show mask-like faces emerging from the meticulously constructed layers of glass as the light touches the surface creating potent, fleeting images of the human. Such works contain in some form the essence of Lindean Mill Glass: rooted in deep human time and in the art and mystery of glassmaking.

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Ideas have been continuously pulled forward by what Annica describes as ‘a daily excitement about the possibilities of glass’. Forty years on this seems undimmed and this interweaving of practical design thinking and artistic ambition has seen Lindean Mill Glass persist and flourish where larger scale domestic glass production in Scotland and elsewhere in Europe (including Orrefors and Boda) have now failed.

The Borders of Scotland are an important backdrop to their story.

It is a landscape shaped by human industry – farming, forestry, milling and textile production. It is a landscape of greys, greens, blues – shifting light filtered through the many water courses, streams and lochs. Over the past decade this landscape has begun to appear more directly in the work in a series of fused glass panels designed by Annica in which cylinders of coloured glass are blown, then opened up and slumped flat to create jewel-like sheets that are the foundation of a form of glass collage. Sheets are moved around, composed, shifted in the studio until a rightness is achieved and only then are fused together to create panels that suggest a subtle rendering of this Borders landscape: a place in which water, land and light are harnessed and transposed into the never quite still ‘rigid liquid’.(2) In 1978 David and Annica stepped into a world filled with 5,000 years of ancestors : a world that links ancient Mesopotamia (where glassmaking originated) with twentieth century Scotland; American modernism with Scandinavian mythology and European industry. With great skill, and modesty, they have made a world through glass that draws on that history and in so doing they have given new life to an abandoned mill and continuing pleasure to thousands around the world who use and enjoy their glass every day.

Amanda Game Independent Curator, Producer 2018 (1)Historic Environment Scotland (https://canmore.org.uk/collection/434043) (2)‘Rigid liquid’ is a term sometimes used to describe the unique material properties of glass which is neither a liquid nor a solid.

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There is a firm silky fluidity to the form and feel of Lindean Mill Glass.

What the eye sees the fingers find and dwell on in touch. Graceful line, clear silhouette is sprung from the centre. Holding their glass, our fingers rotate slowly the stem and cup, feeling balance and subtleties of surface opening to the rim. In steady-state we trace the molten process of making on the revolving punty: cup, collar, stem and base blown in breath, drawn out and shaped in heat, all firmly jointed for the finger tips.

In the Optic range an undulating varying thickness in glass is explored to great effect. Achieved by blowing a bubble of molten glass into a ribbed mould and subsequently opened out, the glass catches the light and optically distorts and magnifies all around in reflection and transparency.

The abstracting ripple effect achieved enhances the inherent fluidity of the glass and the fingers instinctively explore further these magnified undulations of surface. A coloured rim is drawn out in generous circumference: our eyes delight and our lips savour its roundedness enriching the smoothness of its liquid content. It is this merging of the senses which makes Lindean Mill Glass tableware so sensuous and pleasurable in use. So many of Lindean Mill’s glass objects and individual pieces excite our senses in this way.

In their exploration of opaque to opalescence to translucency: as white on white, cool yet never cold.

And in colour; blobbed colour, trailed colour radiates outwards: intense to translucent, merging us with the making, seen in the round within and through the vessel. Reserved smoky colour, clear radiant colour, infusing all. Their coloured bowls are gems, standing clear they alone can set a room alight.

From the depth of the dark, low lying murrini plates, pools of sadness, arise the panels created by Annica. Working with David in their making these panels are an expressive artistic refinement of many of the elements inherent in all Lindean Mill Glass. They have grown out of and are reliant on the intimate collaboration between them both in glass. These panels like a Lindean bowl or cylinder can set the tone of a room: in artistic achievement each is like a poem drawing all around to it.

Complex in planning and making the panels appear effortless.

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Earlier graal figuration is now abstracted to an essence. In silhouette limbs appear as body and as glass panel. The stem and jointing so central to the glassware now gives way to spine, as one sheet of slumped colour glass is fused to another. At this point of meeting is spirit energy, a kundalini of sorts, a sliver of clear light zips upwards within the flame fusion of colour. Light the essential ingredient of all their glass plays over the surface of each panel and through it revealing its subtleties and softened molten edges. Light essentially, reveals and illuminates the panel’s internal veils of shifting shape colour. These shifts and shapes in colour are not happenings by chance; they are preplanned in the bubble embryo form from which the muffs and subsequent sheets of glass are made. Decisively, monumentally turned horizontal, and with much arrangement these sheets of colour veils create landscape, weather and atmospheric depth.

Once more jointed, they fuse an intensity of meeting of land to water, image to reflection: glass to glass as artistic expression.

Helen Douglas

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78-18 CV ANNICA SANDSTRÖM - SWEDEN 1972-73 1973-75 1975-77 1977 1978-date

KOMS, School of art & the environment, Sundsvall, Sweden Nyckelvik, School of Art Craft & Design, Stockholm, Sweden Konstfack, College of Arts Crafts & Design, Stockholm, Sweden Millfield Pottery, Saltglaze ceramic workshop, Everton, UK Lindean Mill Glass, Galashiels, Scotland

DAVID KAPLAN - USA 1970 1971-72 1972-74 1974-75 1975-76 1977-date 100

Goddard College, Vermont, USA Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, Scotland Orrefors Glass School, Orrefors, Sweden Åsbogården Glass Studio, Gävle, Sweden Glassmaker, Boda Glass Works, Boda, Sweden Lindean Mill Glass, Galashiels, Scotland

COMMISSIONS Glass panels for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction; the Margaret Kerr Unit in Melrose and private collections.

‘Divergence’ a metal & glass sculpture in collaboration with John Creed for Aberdeen Art Gallery.

Award vases for The Rivers Trust, UK Millennium Clock Tower collaboration for the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh.

Design commissions for Tiffany’s New York; Nicole Farhi Home; the Cabinet Office UKGov and the Business Sponsorship of the Arts (ABSA), London.

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS Aberdeen Art Gallery; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Crafts Council Collection, London; British Council Collection, London; Museum of Edinburgh; Broadfield House Glass Museum, Kingswinford; Ulster Museum, Belfast; North West Arts, Manchester; Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead; Lillie Art Gallery, Glasgow; National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh; Röhsska Konstslöjd Museet, Gothenburg, Sweden; Turner Collection, Sheffield; Scottish Crafts Collection, Edinburgh; Kelvingrove Museum & Art Gallery, Glasgow; Haworth Art Gallery, Accrington.

AWARDS Inches Carr Crafts Bursary, Inches Carr Trust, Edinburgh Crafts Fellowship, Scottish Development Agency, Edinburgh EXHIBITIONS Over the past 40 years Annica and David’s work have been shown in over 150 exhibitions across Europe, USA and Japan 101

page - details -date 18 Leaf goblet 1978

‘Pokal’ candleholder & wine glass 1978 19 Party glasses 1979 20 Duck plate 1981 21 Graal goblet 1982 Trellis bowl 1984

Contemplating Nude 1985 23 Lidded Jar 1984 24 Bowls with colour rims 1996 25 Dust Bowl & High Ball vase 1997 26 Plates Faces 1987 27 Plate ‘Blue Face’ 1989 28 Vessel ‘Parade’ 1990 29 Vessel ‘Two Men’ 1987 30 Bowls Heads 1986 31 Bowl ‘Lined Faces’ 1988 32 Cylinder ‘Back to Back’ 1986 33 Figurative cylinder 1991 34 Cylinder ‘By the Sea’

1997 35 Glass canvases ‘Here & Now’ 1995

‘Stepping Out’ 1995 37 Cylinder ‘Bean Jar’ 1996 38 Panel Blue 1998 39 Panel ‘Unfold’ 1998 42 Studio Range 43 Optic & Colour Range 44 Colour Range 45 Colour Range 46 Gem Collection 102

48 Solid Candleholders 49 Optic Tumblers 51 Optic & Colour Range 54 Optic Range, Gem Collection & Colour Range 56 Pebble vases 57 Wrap vases 58 Petal bowl 60 Ripple bowl ‘Dawn’ 61 Colour & Optic Range 62 Pebble vase, Hoop cylinder 63 Cups with spots 65 Plate ‘Watermarks’ 2004 67 Panel ‘White on White’ 2006 69 Panel ‘Between the Lines’ 2006 70 Panels ‘Borderline No1’ 2010 71 ‘Borderline No3’ 2010 73 Plate ‘Pool’ 2004 75 Panel ‘Viridian Landscape’ 2015 78 Detail panel ‘Northlands’ 2016 80 Panel Walter Scott Prize

for Historical Fiction 2015 83 Wall panel ‘Pool’ 2011 84 Panel ‘Twilight’ 2018 85

Panel ‘New Light’ 2016 86 Panel ‘Sea’ 2017 89 Panel ‘Flux’ 2018 93 Detail panel ‘Still’ 2018 97 Panel ‘Flow’ 2018 98-99 Panel ‘Ebb & Flow’ 2017 103

acknowledgements Thanks go to David and Annica for their assistance in making this possible. Without the historic information and the use of archive material this would not have been the same publication. Also thanks to Amanda Game for the introduction. My son Woody for taking photographs of Lindean Mill and works in progress. Shannon Tofts for the use of his images of Lindean Mill works from across the years.

The Scottish Glass Society for having their annual exhibition at Gallery TEN in 2017. Behind the scenes my family in particular Ann as always for her support and encouragement. PM - G10 We would like to thank Paul for inviting us to exhibit at Gallery TEN and tackling 40 years of glassmaking. Amanda Game for her essay, understanding and perspective. Helen Douglas for her commentary, support and encouragement over the years. Bjรถrn Borseth for being an all-round, multi-tasking assistant. D&A - LMG Copyright - Gallery TEN & LMG 2018

image credits Annica Sandstrom 20.28.31.37.42.44.46.48.49.56.57.60.61.67.69.73.75.78.80.83 86.93.98.99 Woody Musgrove 3.9.11.13.14.15.18.19.21.23.40.43.45.47.50.51.52.53.54.55.58

59.66.74.76.90.91.92.94.106 Shannon Tofts 62.63.70.71.84.85.86.89.97 Paul Musgrove 17.79.105 Ken Smith 27.32.33 Colin Cuthbert 24.26.30 Rob Sutherland 25 Bjรถrn Borseth 107 Kevin Greenfield 80 David Kaplan 95 Unattributed images remain the copyright of the artists or gallery.

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1978-2018

Lindean Mill Glass

1978-2018