Modern Art Simplified

Credit (and kudos) to John Atkinson

Heike Brachlow

Heike Brachlow gave a talk at a Contemporary Glass Society meeting on Saturday (5th September).

I'd come across Heike already because my latest glass project (currently stalled) has some   "geometric" aspects, and Heike's work is very geometric - lots of rectangles, cylinders and so on.   Here's a link to a Pinterest board of her work.

And here's a few of my take-aways from her talk:

Photographs

Heike says she spends a lot on photography and it's clearly paid off.  For instance, it led to her being on the cover of an exhibition catalogue, and that led to her getting noticed.

Her last slide listed the 3 photographers she uses - Ester Segarra, Simon Bruntnell and Roger Lee.

Precariousness

 Heike's website lists the "drivers" behind a lot of her work.   They include "the slightly odd" and "precariousness, stability, equilibrium, imbalance".  

Some of her more well-known works are cylinders with a slightly pointed base, so they move when touched.  They evoke quite a strong reaction in me (and probably everyone else) because it feels as though they could easily fall over.  It puts me on edge.  

I'm not sure whether I could handle owning one of these sculptures because I would be worrying about it all the time!  

Glass classes

Heike listed some places that run workshops:

Corning Museum of Glass (Corning, New York State)

Pilchuck Glass School, Seattle (mostly hot glass)

North Lands (Caithness, north east Scotland)

Cesty Skla (Czech Republic - recently started."affordable".)

Cold Working

After her talk I asked Heike about cold-working.  She says she does most of it with Suhner angle grinders.  Since then, I've been checking them out.  See this video. 

They are REALLY expensive and would require quite a lot of other equipment, but I've got a milestone birthday coming up in a few months...(ahem)