December 3, 2021by Rebecca NewnhamExhibitions Glass Pieces News

The Great Epiphany; Fun and Colourful

Epiphany: Swarm Blur Sharyn’s Shed Series (300 x 200mm)

The Epiphany series are glass sketches with colourful enamels fired onto the surface, edged with copper, and with an optional oak stand.

The sketches are colourful abstracts inspired by aspects of an experience, painted onto glass with a history, previously a shed window or a greenhouse or a front door, so has had all kinds of experiences reflected in the surface.

I paint with glass enamels, a practice started when first at art college and which has developed in many different directions in my work since. Enamel is a permanent colour that won’t fade in sunlight.

The glass sketch sizes are significant, as I have drawn them in sketchbooks that are either A4 or postcard sized for decades so this reflects my practice.

This series of sketches started during weekly Sculptors Drawing Space, which is a shared platform where creatives from all over the world share quiet drawing time, initiated, and presided over by Mark Richards, a fellow sculptor, where each participant draws independently and shares audio, listening to others mark marking.

Summertime Sharyn’s Shed Series (300 x 200mm)

Wink gallery are showing Epiphany works on glass salvaged from another family’s garden shed, in the New Forest. The colour sketches are about stories I have heard of the family, like their bees swarming or a black bird building a nest and laying eggs inside the shed. These sketches are like memories or dreams once reflected in the glass of the windows, moments captured or reimagined.

I find my own family transitioning into a next chapter as our children have grown up and left for university and work, I feel keenly the passing of time and the next phase beginning. This is on my mind as I consider another family living through cycles of life, replanting, harvesting, and adapting to new circumstances.

It’s a complicated time with climate change, a pandemic, uncertainty on many fronts. Using glass which has had a previous use as a shed window or a greenhouse or a front door, helps to reuse our precious resources in a creative and mindful manor. Aspects of life, mundane and dramatic were reflected in the glass over the years and this is a way of alluding to some of the memories. It also reuses a surface which although recyclable, often finds itself in landfill because of the way we don’t separate out different types of glass, which can lead to incompatibility problems. Ideally, we should reuse glass, refill bottles, recycle when necessary, not in place of cleaning.