Amanda: ‘When we started you only needed a bag of tools and a small duplicate book [for orders] and if you went to an event you’d sketch the object you were making for customers. Now you’ve got to be shouting about it on social media, photographing it and doing a huge amount of extra work to market it all. It’s amazing the amount of time you need to spend on things like that in relation to actually making.’
Charlie: ‘We used to employ other people but we became managers not makers. When we moved down here to Poundbury, one of the motivations was to do bigger work and push the boundaries of what we could do. We needed to move our creativity forward so we decided that the two of us would have to do everything including sweeping the floors and making the tea but we’ve been able to push our designs onwards and then, because we are actually making everything ourselves, our skills are improving.’
Charlie: ‘As a maker you shut yourself away and you follow your own aesthetic but when you first put it out there you’ve got no idea how people will respond to it. The only way of measuring it is whether you are selling stuff. You’re not really following fashions and trends, you’re on a journey of discovery with your material. You’re doing something that’s almost timeless and, like any artwork, you want people to respond to it whether it’s positive or negative. As makers you want people to own something that creates an emotion in them.’
Charlie: ‘We both do our own work but the process of blowing glass means you need to work with somebody else, one blowing and the other assisting. We both design and make our own pieces. We have split the business tasks in two but creatively we both have to have our work to have our own satisfaction. We used to do the commissioned work together but now we’ll take certain projects on individually, playing to our strengths. If a commission comes about from someone seeing what one of us has done, that person will get on with the design and the other will deal with all the to-ing and fro-ing.’
Bringing two seperate molten glass pieces together to form the final structure designed by Amanda. Charlie says: ‘with some of Amanda’s work though we sometimes need two of us blowing to join two pieces together.’
Amanda: ‘When you’re working on a piece and you’re knackered, it’s getting heavy and you doubt whether you can do it, the other person may say “do this, do this”, so you try and there’s a really moment of “Wow, I actually just managed that and I didn’t think I could”. That’s a huge benefit of working together. Sometimes having a fresh approach just works, other times you end up having a blazing row and it doesn’t. On the whole it’s that working together that I really enjoy because without that there’s nobody to challenge you or push you to take that extra step.’
‘This is the hot shop and it’s where the glass blowing and some of the kiln work takes place. The furnace is left on 24/7 and everything centres around that. Inside the furnace is a crucible containing the molten glass held at around 1200ºC. We also use kilns for firing stuff in or picking stuff up. When you’ve finished a piece it looks cold but it’s still actually incredibly hot so we pop it in the kiln at 500ºC for annealing which brings the temperature down gradually overnight so things aren’t ready to touch until mid morning the next day.’
‘Next along is our glory-hole, which we try to remember to call a reheating chamber when members of the public are in. Then we have a trundling pig which is mounted on wheels and runs on a track. It’s used to support the iron while we rotate a heavy piece in the chamber.’
‘The furnace is left on 24/7 but we have had to rebuild it a couple of times. For various reasons we use soda glass, not the traditional 24% lead crystal. The soda glass is horrible to polish, taking about three times as long compared to lead crystal which is like butter. However, the soda glass is really reliable, it gives the colour a bit of zing and it’s lighter in weight. The working life it has in the hot shop is shorter because the glass cools much quicker so you’ve got to be faster on your feet and keep returning to reheat before the temperature drops too much.’
Amanda: ‘We buy colours in from Germany and New Zealand. They come in rods, fine powders, granules or chunks. They can be in the glass or on the surface or trapped in between using a variety of techniques. Charlie makes the coloured canes which he then inserts in to his work. Sometimes the whole glass looks, say purple, but the glass itself is actually clear with just a fine layer of purple near the surface. When we buy the colour in it’s really dense and almost looks black. For a really big piece we could use as much as a third of a kilo so we can go through it quite quickly’
Charlie: ‘There’s a balance between letting the material do what it wants but controlling it to do what you want. You will always be able to tell if you’ve forced things whereas if you coax the piece and work with the material rather than let it lead, the work you produce will be stronger. Different colours blow out differently, a temperature change can affect things, but what we’re bringing is the experience of knowing. Glass blowing is basically about controlling heat and knowing where that heat is and then it’s about patterns and designs. The actual blowing is a tiny, tiny part of it’
Amanda marks where she needs to polish. ‘First off we use the diamond saw. If it’s flat, we go on to a flat bed grinder with 100 grit then on to a smaller grinder with a smoother 400 grit. Then you’d hand lap with the 600 grit. From there you’d pumice on a cork wheel. After that you’re left with slight, feint lines on the surface so we use jewellers’ rouge or cerium oxide on a felt wheel to get rid of them. There’s a chemical reaction and the heat that’s generated through the friction causes the mild acid to work to give us a lovely, polished surface. That’s where the magic happens, I think’
‘Glass has quite a matte texture until you get to the pumice wheel. When you pumice it’s the first time you get to really look into the material and reveal what’s going on within the thickness of the glass. You get to see reflections and the patterns and textures that you’ve put inside and any faults’
‘Most of what we make is cut, ground and polished or carved, ground and polished. They are the cold processes in the cold shop. We’ve got the saw which we use to cut off sections which is rough and chippy. Then we move on to the flat bed grinders with carborundum grit, using a similar process as sandpaper. Another technique I use is sand etching which uses pressurised air to blast the glass with sand which produces deep textures on my pieces. I mask off the parts of the polished glass and then etch and carve off the area around the patterned masking to give a three dimensional appearance’
Charlie: ‘In the entire time I’ve been making, I could probably count on my fingers the number of pieces I’d really like to keep for myself. There’s very, very few I’d be loathe to get rid of but also the necessity of having to sell dictates that. When you’re making you’re always battling the issue of improving. I can make a piece which is lovely and I can see that it’s made well, it’s finished well and it’s lovely but there’s always that thing about wanting to take yourself to the next stage, the next level, the next piece’
Amanda: ‘Each piece is just a snapshot of a journey of discovery with my materials. I started out way back when looking at plankton forms as a source of inspiration but it’s moved on a lot from that. I do still look to those sources as an inspiration, to flick through each piece informs the next, and chasing the what ifs: what if I try that or change this or push this in there, put a texture in here and how will that reflect on this surface or that surface’
Amanda Notarianni and Charlie Macpherson’s completed works in their studio workshop in Poundbury, Dorset
