Clare Gaylard Artisan Glass 

Working glass directly in a flame is one of the most absorbing and direct methods of engaging with the medium - and how else to get such a complete vision of arrested motion?

I'm working towards exhibiting with fellow Suffolk Craft Society Makers Annabel Ridley and Susan Bruce.

Started with the Peacock in our garden (I'm usually too busy trying to help them escape from the house to get a photo) and then it was like finding a pearl in every oyster. There is a beautiful, ridged beetle nesting in the heart of the white flower. Names of flora and fauna as ever escape me.

You know you brought them up right when they take better photos of your work than you. I was pleased to bring this chap home with me, although my stock of buried treasure was rather depleted by the end of 'Above and Below', I came away with some wonderful work by fellow artists Clive Barnett and Madeline Nightingale - an occupational hazard of exhibiting with artists you admire.

To everyone who came by to lean in and observe fine detail and small things at Above and Below at The Quay Gallery over the past week. 

It wouldn't be a stint at The Quay Gallery without a photo of the lovely Cygnet moored outside. We have print, glass and stitch and fine weather.

'Buried Treasure glass for 'Above and Below at The Quay Gallery, Snape Maltings. "5th -31st July with Clive Barnett and Madeline Nightingale.

I took this photo last week in Devon on the cliffs above Hartland Quay and the oddness and extra-beauty of it has been low-key bothering me for a few days. I worked it out on getting back home, suddenly remembering clocking a sign at Hartland Quay saying that filming for 'Rebecca' by Du Maurier had recently completed - so the boat and the phrase Je Reviens is entirely significant artifice!

With Clive Barnett and Madeline Nightingale. 25th - 31st July 2019.

Sunshine on glass, a frustrating yet wonderful issue with glass is trying to represent true colour when every shift in natural light (which I prefer) yields something entirely different. Find some of my Sunglitter glass at the Suffolk Craft Society Summer Exhibition until 26th August 2019.

‘They have brought me a shell

it sings inside

a sea on a map.

My heart

fills up with water

with a little fish

shadow and silver

They have brought me a shell.’

Federico Garcia Lorca

An excellent article about the institution that is the Suffolk Craft Society Summer Exhibition (which I co-organised last year) and a pleasant suprise to scroll down and find some of my work featured. https://www.eadt.co.uk/what-s-on/suffolk-craft-society-stages-annual-exhibition-in-aldeburgh-2019-1-6159048?fbclid=IwAR3UjNt2TCJkOvCQ9SmAaXldb73rlaIzFAreNuF1uOeS5_wKFFayAOyOTX4

A few weekends of demonstrating how to make twisted glass cane leaves me with a workbench littered with latticino. Its such a swift, alchemical moment and the results are extremely satisfying. Last SOS weekend coming up!

Bees and birds, markings on coats & feathers and beady eyes.

The wildflowers were in my studio and after a week had created such a vibrant confetti that I just left it.

Totem.

I don't think it's projecting to suggest this waterlogged bee is finding all this rain as frustrating as the rest of us.

Well the truth is somewhere in between. My studio workbench is deliberately pristine for Open Studios and my home workbench is utterly chaotic as I'm working to various commission deadlines. There is probably and ap that can merge them to show the somewhere in between where I usually am. Another lovely Suffolk Open Studio day yesterday and the sun is out for today!

Among the new and returning guests on the first SOS weekend were Lark Images. Chris and Valerie combine their skills with photography and bookbinding and wanted to show me how they had used some of my glass buttons and beads. These handbound, leather journals (or sketchbooks..) were elegant and meticulously made. Find Lark Images on the 'Harleston and Waveney Art Trail' and on Instagram.