The Visual Artists’ News Sheet
March – April 2017
9
Antrim & Newtownabbey: Resources & Activities The Art of Glass
A Vague Sense of Order
Andrea Spencer, Circulatory, from ‘Fragile and Fugitive States of Being’
Andrea Spencer at work
ORIGINALLY from Hertfordshire, England, I left Edinburgh College of Art with a degree in Architectural Glass in 1993. A week after graduating I moved to Belfast. Shortly after this, the Northern Ireland peace process began to bring about significant changes. There was an injection of investment in healthcare infrastructure, which instigated a series of new builds, replacing or updating old facilities and providing new centres to accommodate the changing face of healthcare. Outmoded Victorian facilities were replaced with modern architecture, encompassing large expanses of curtain wall glazing and presenting possibilities for architectural glass commissions. Considering the small glass arts community in Northern Ireland at that time, I was uniquely placed to capitalise on these developments. I was awarded my first public art commission in 2003 and over the past 14 years I have worked consistently on one or more commissions per year. To date I have completed over 20 commissions, all within Northern Ireland, and comprising a variety of approaches, including large suspended sculpture, curtain wall glazing and mixed media works. All of the commissions I have designed and fabricated feature glass as the primary material. I use blown, cast, fused and flame-worked glass, depending on what the project requires. I design the work so I can produce the glass myself, preferably in my own studio. Over the years, when possible, I have reinvested any profit back into the studio to purchase equipment, thus expanding the range of work I can fabricate. In 2008, having been awarded a significant commission for the Northern Ireland Cancer Centre – which proposed bespoke blown glass elements alongside a custom fabricated stainless steel armature – my practice began to outgrow my studio (at that time located in the centre of Belfast). I needed to consider taking on a larger studio space to accommodate the fabrication of a project of this scale. I had also begun collaborating with my partner, glassblower Scott Benefield, so we decided to build our own glass studio. We began looking for a suitable space in Belfast. However, we found that the kind of space we required was not readily available in a city that seemed to be rapidly losing most of its gritty artists’ spaces. One weekend we ventured out of Belfast for a short family holiday in a Heritage Trust property in Randalstown, County Antrim. Prior to this, I had never even set foot in the area in my 15 years of living in Northern Ireland. During that visit a
happenstance conversation with an estate agent coincided with the retirement plans of a local builder, and within two weeks we had secured both a studio space and a new place to live. What we had been looking for in Belfast we found in Randalstown, with more advantages than we had imagined. The new studio was the former joinery workshop of a family-run building business. The building – approximately 1000 square foot with double barn doors and solid floors – had a 100A threephase electricity service and panoramic views across the fields towards Slemish. At the time, it fulfilled all the requirements crucial to our needs. With a larger space and financial support from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, I was able to build a large-format fusing kiln. We then self-funded to build a glassblowing furnace and invested in the equipment required to run a comprehensive glassmaking facility. For the past nine years, we have taught workshops, fabricated pieces for other artists, produced props for Game of Thrones, introduced a blown glass production line, undertaken large-scale architectural commissions and provided rental of the facilities. The Randalstown studio has been essential for making our autonomous work for gallery shows and exhibitions. Relocating my practice to rural County Antrim brought many unanticipated benefits. Being positioned within a farming community provided access to many varied resources: an extensively stocked local hardware shop, neighbours with a forklift and a nearby facility that can roll stainless steel sheet metal. There are hidden gems in the smaller towns, such as the Clotsworthy Art Centre in Antrim and the viaduct and river walk of Randalstown. There were other intangible benefits to living outside of a major city as well. Having a studio in a rural location provides me with access to nature and close proximity to inspiring landscapes, which I have drawn upon time and time again to provide imagery for my gallery pieces and public commissions. Artists form communities, both virtual and real, wherever they practice, and this is as true in far-flung settings as it is in cities. Belfast and Derry may be the cultural and artistic hubs of Northern Ireland, but there is a surprising amount of good work coming from artists practicing in the more remote corners of Ulster. Andrea Spencer andreaspencerglass.com
GLENGORMLEY can be a place people pass through on the way to somewhere, but one never knows what things are being created in the anonymous garages of the Belfast suburbs. They say it’s always a little colder above the blue-grey valley than in town, a fact not lost on the fingers of a sculptor. I have a studio in the garage that I built with my da. It once housed our ponies and their painted carts. Some were wild, unbroken. Now this place houses a wild mess and a wild heart. My youth was spent in Glengormley. My parents moved to this house during my teenage years. When I look out of the studio, which is still half a horse stable, I can almost hear Bowie and Prince. I remember the me who lived in the attic, painted murals in the city, and had mad long hair and piercings that ran up the side of my ear. There is organisation in the chaos, a vague sense of order, like one might discover on an archaeological dig. Across a long table from left to right, from permeable to rigid, there are a number of materials: plaster, wax, rubber, clay and stone. A single gas ring burns, blackening the blades and the tips of pointed tools in its flame. I am planted in this place. Roses grow wild outside the door. I am holding a figure of a man in wax balancing on a unicycle with a heart-shaped saddle in one hand. I’m hoping the wax captures the words of Stewart Parker’s play Spokesong, representing his version of life in my city. It’s a broken yet hopeful vision, where a vein of humanity, as he says, runs through it all. The commission, this time, is private. Lynne Parker of Rough Magic Theatre Company is the playwright’s niece. The work came to me as most work does, over a pint in a pub. Lynne had seen my Beckett bronzes in the RHA in Dublin and asked me to create a life-size representation of Stewart Parker’s work. There are plans to place it in Belfast, hopefully in Writer’s Square, but I enjoy the challenge no matter where the work ends up. Parker once said that Spokesong was about asking how “one could, in Ireland, cope with the past”. It’s a young man’s tale, a powerful slice into the psyche of life in troubled times. The struggle is familiar, although Parker’s hero Frank is ahead of his time in terms of urban vision and environmentalism, seeing bicycles as the answer to urban congestion. However, like everyone, the hero is just trying to have a life. Writers’ Square would be a fitting spot for the bronze: it was recently one of the first places to
install bicycles that you can rent and drop off around the town, which I thought was quite apt. The destination of this work is not something I dwell on. I try not to get my hopes up while I make. The idea of manifesting Parker’s vision is daunting enough, as he is not only a cultural icon but someone’s brother, uncle, partner and son. Public and private lives collide when you make a sculpture of this scope but the story that inspires it is always the most important element. Using bronze to illustrate literature is difficult but ultimately satisfying. Although the process is temperamental, it does allow for the appropriate gestural detail. In this sort of work, detail is everything. You have to get it just so. With the bronzes of my last work, the Samuel Beckett Chess Set, I had 32 opportunities to show moments of detail that would illuminate the writer’s work, but with the Parker commission there was just one chance to capture and express the substance of his play. The piece had to become an amalgam of the characters’ spirits. I was inspired by a line in the play about Belfast: “...There’s a rich vein of humanity in it, no doubt” and chose to call the piece The Common Wheel. This is the subtitle of the play and a combination of two of details: the Trick Cyclist’s unicycle and Dunlop’s first pneumatic tyre (another creation born in an anonymous garage). And so I placed Parker’s hero Frank balancing on a unicycle made with the first pneumatic tyre rising out of a gold-leaf vein in the granite slab. I thought of Kintsukuroi or ‘golden repair’, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer and powdered gold, a philosophical approach that treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. This seemed fitting when speaking of my native city. Being an artist in Belfast means working in collaboration with fellow artists and craftspeople, in this instance the kind twin sisters Claire and Karen Gibson at Red Earth Designs, and gentleman Ken Barr, Lecturer in Foundry Practice at Belfast Metropolitan College. Being an artist in the suburbs means that the unveiling of a commissioned work does not include fine wine but tea with homemade scones and jam.
Alan Milligan at work
Alan Milligan casting bronze
Alan S. Milligan is a lecturer at South West College, Enniskillen. ‘The Common Wheel’ maquette is now at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast. asmilligan.com