Clare Gaylard Glass 

All Saints Church is a lovely little medieval church in some need of maintenance. This weekend is the annual Art Exhibition/Fundraiser so the work of local artists on display and for sale from 11am - 5pm on Saturday 3rd and Sunday 4th September. I have been developing my 'Telling the Bees' glass.

- are better when there is a kiln to unload.

The last Suffolk Open Studio weekend is over - thank you to everyone who passed through: visitors from other years, other exhibitions, people interested in learning or even in setting up their own studios. One of the questions I have learned to ask first is: 'Do you make?'.

There is a ring here for Jenny - it's a commission, now she just has to decide which one!

'Buried Treasure' in this gentle, Suffolk landscape comes in the form of Viking treasure, fossils, and towns taken back by the sea.

A bee explored my landscape pendant while I was taking outside photographs today. Putting me in mind of this lovely thing:

'.....Last night as I lay sleeping,

I dreamt – marvellous error! –

that I had a beehive

here inside my heart.

And the golden bees

were making white combs

and sweet honey

from my old failures.'

Antonio Machada

 

I make a lot of twisted cane when I'm doing demos for Open Studios and the last couple of centimetres are of limited use, but too pretty to throw away - my stash continues to grow.

Sketch and some glass ready for assembly for my 'Three Crowns' theme - East Anglian ghost kings, buried treasure and memento mori inspired by M R James short story set in local  Aldeburgh:  'A Warning to the Curious'.

Have another little piece of my heart now...

Millefiori two ways - on a wax candle in the background and my own handmade ones in glass on a pendant. The same process of pattern constructed on the cross section, elongated then cut into chunks or chips and applied. A thousand flowers.

Delft, Ming, Ghzhel, tatoos, indigo dyed fabric. Floor to ceiling cabinets of blue and white china in the British Museum and the dangerous stacks of it in Bangkok's Chatuchak Market, I love it. Its been nearly ten years since we left Thailand and my mongrel collection of blue and white pottery is sadly thinned out. A good enough reason to reach out for the colours in my glass. 

'Eastern Promise', our art exhibition is showing at The Quay Gallery, Snape Maltings until 5.30pm Thursday 12th May. We have had four days of magnificent sunshine and welcomed many visitors already. A new Henry Moore statue looks out over the reed beds and the widening river along all the usual reasons to visit this uniquely cultural and historic venue.

I'm part of the A1120 Artist Trail, a downloadable map is available from the Suffolk Open Studios website. Serendipitously, the artist who created the map: Lorrette E Roberts also lived and worked in Asia and her work was familiar to me from our time in Singapore. What are the odds on us ending up in rural Suffolk in adjacent villages?

Sketching for 'Treasure in the Landscape'.

A deeply satisfying shape, from Whitby with some rings I made yesterday.

Work in progress, should have been for Valentine's Day but keeps evolving. Lilac Wine: Nina Simone or Jeff Buckley for choice. My youngest has a pig obsession at the moment and so of course they have become Lilac Swine.

From a decade or so ago tend to lapse into toddler drawings due to seemingly endless long haul flights and immense traffic jams in Bangkok. It bothered me at the time but I'm liking looking back at them.

 So artist Jill Hedges contacted me with an inspired plan for a scaled 5km 'Space Walk', to take place at night. Having an astrophysicist and other artists on the project already and having fixed on the largest object, the 'sun' (at 1.18 metres) Jill was looking for a minute and somewhat mysterious planet earth, to be lit from within, coming in at 11mm.

This was my first batch of test pieces, hollows with space for a tiny LED light. She settled on one of the test batch, an etched turquoise sphere with cloud trails rolling beneath the surface.

For a friend.

My first exhibition that combined glass and paintings, some African influenced pieces, an early caryatid and a lachryotomy (tear jar) in the form of a female torso.