North Lands Creative Glass celebrates its tenth anniversary in 2006, founding director Dan Klein explains the artistic spirit that has led to it becoming one of Europe’s principal centres of excellence.

North Lands Creative Glass was set up in 1995 in the North Eastern coastal village of Lybster, Caithness, in response to a growing interest in using glass as a medium for artistic expression.

Since the 1960s glass departments with this idea in mind have been established in British art schools and universities. Sam Herman, a hippy American glassblower, had come to Edinburgh College of Art as a Fulbright Scholar. But on meeting resistance to his new ideas about glass making he moved south in 1967 where he had been invited to open a glass department at the Royal College of Art in London. There glass students were encouraged to give free rein to their imagination and to forget any restraints associated with commercial glass production. A new generation of art students literally fell in love with the material and many who went to art school to study other things ended up working with glass. Forty years on glass is used unquestioningly for sculpture, two dimensional art, installation art, conceptual art, architecture and most recently video.

When the renowned Swedish artist Bertil Vallien came to give the first master class at North Lands in Lybster in 1996, the equipment was almost embarrassingly basic but functional. Two of Britain’s most experienced glass artists, Keith Cummings from Wolverhampton University and Ray Flavell from Edinburgh College of Art, had designed a workshop, complete with furnace, in what can only be described as an outhouse. The Scottish Arts Council, Caithness & Sutherland Enterprise, The Foundation for Sport and the Arts and a number of private donors and charities, had provided the necessary funding and Iain Gunn, chairman of North Lands Creative Glass since its inception, and his wife had generously made the premises available. 

By 2002 interest in North Lands had grown to such an extent that with the help of various private donations and funding bodies, notably the Scottish Arts Council Lottery Fund, it was possible to move down the road in Lybster to the Alistair Pilkington studio, a state of the art glass studio housed in a refurbished Victorian school building. This was opened by HRH Prince Charles Duke of Rothesay in July 2002.

Every summer masters of glass and related art forms and practitioners from all over the world join to work together at North Lands in a spirit of artistic and technical collaboration. They are inspired as much by the magical Caithness light and landscape as by the skills they learn at what is now considered one of Europe’s principal centres of excellence. There is an annual thematic conference in the Village Hall, which has become something of a destination for glass makers, gallery owners and curators worldwide who congregate in Caithness for the occasion.

Here glass is worked in every conceivable way. It can be worked hot on the end of a blowpipe to create bubbles that are turned into either vessels or sculpture (blown glass). Glass can be stacked in moulds or slumped and fired in a kiln (Cast glass and kiln formed glass). It can also be cast using the lost wax technique (usually associated with bronze). It can be shaped by being warmed over a gas flame (lamp-worked glass). When cold it can be ground or polished or engraved to shape it further. It can both absorb and transmit light.  In short both in its hot, warm and cold states it can be worked in endless different ways.

At North Lands the aim is to extend its artistic potential through master classes, the annual conference and two or three funded residencies per year where groups of artists work together to develop new ideas. There is also an extensive outreach programme that has met with enthusiastic response from both primary and secondary schools in the area.

Many of the glass artists who have visited North Lands have been inspired by local scenery, local archaeological sites, local architecture and of course the kaleidoscopic effects of an ever changing sky over land and sea in the area.

‘Reflections – A Decade of North Lands Creative Glass’, featuring over 60 works by internationally acclaimed glass makers who have led master classes, held artistic residencies, or studied at the centre is on at the Museum of Scotland, Chambers Street, Edinburgh EH1 1JF tel: 0131 247 4422  from 21 July 2006 to 7 January 2007. Opening hours Monday to Saturday 10am to 5pm and Sunday 12 noon to 5pm.  Admission free.  Read our craftscotland review and news story.

A second exhibition, 'Northern Light' ,is showing new work by eleven glass artists with connections to North Lands Creative Glass.  It is on at the Scottish Gallery, 16 Dundas Street, Edinburgh EH3 6HZ tel: 0131 558 1200 from 4 August to 6 September 2006.  Admission free.  Read our news story.

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