THE GLASS MENAGERIE
Artist Leisa Wharington on her love of glass.
FOR MUCH OF HER LIFE, Leisa Wharington has been under the spell of glass. She was only 10 when she took classes with a local potter on the Mornington Peninsula, and it was there that she saw her first glassblowing demonstration. “This glass business was so fluid and amazing, and the atmosphere in the studio was dynamic!” says Leisa. “The fluid material was boiling hot, and you had to use tools to manipulate it. I was hooked on the drama of it.”
Now decades on, Leisa, 59, is a renowned glass artist who works from her collective creative space, The Studio & Co. It’s an old auto shop and complex of converted shipping containers shared with five other artists — and a coffee roaster — at Hastings on the Western Port Bay side of the Mornington Peninsula. Here, in front of a furnace blasting up to 1250°C, she spins, twists and rolls molten glass with theatrical flair into unique shapes defined by gravity and her tools. The glass is translucent, clear or opaque, sometimes coloured like the sea, or even tortoiseshell. Among the various pieces are glasses and decanters, food domes and plates, and blown shapes for the outdoors — “I like to plonk them around the garden” — as well as the delicate hanging vases that have been in her repertoire since she first started.
For the past decade or so Leisa’s also been making bigger, more sculptural pieces, such as chandeliers and “disco balls”, incorporating welded metal and found objects with wavy shaped glass discs. “Chandeliers are synonymous with glass and all the glass discs are made individually on the blowpipe,” she says. “Some have 100 pieces of glass in them and are quite heavy. They are all oval and organic in shape, thick and thin, and spin out differently. That’s what I love about the manipulation of glass, just letting it roll around on the blowpipe and allowing the centrifugal force to take over and dropping the glass down so it spins unevenly — they are slightly concave and look like little washed up jellyfish shapes!” There’s also a variation that she calls her “man lights”. “I use old cogs, old winches and propellers off boats, and put a big glass ball on top with a light fitting in it.”
Leisa, who has daughters Charlotte, 28, and Sophie, 26, and son Max, 22, from her former marriage, was born and bred on the peninsula, and now lives at Somers, in one of the original beach cottages overlooking Western Port with Tilly, her four-year-old rescue Yorkshire terrier. Her love of the beach and this southern coastline is an integral element of her glassblowing. “I’m inspired by nature, and the sand and sea have always been part of my life,” she says. “I walk on the beach every day, and I think that connection with sand and glass is amazing. It starts from a grain >
“The fluid material was boiling hot, and you had to use tools to manipulate it. I was hooked on the drama of it.”
of sand and it’s how you can get this clarity from something as simple as a grain of sand that amazes me. I think glass is a very underrated material.”
The beach is both inspiration and a resource for her work. “I love using found objects,” says Leisa. “I was inspired to create a rope light a few years ago when a friend — a cray fisherman — took me out and he was pulling these lobster pots up with barnacles and mussel shells growing on the rope. That started the whole ball rolling. I find rope washed up on the beach that is discarded from ships — sometimes it’s a bit hard to drag up and across the road — and then I gurney it because it’s full of sand. I’m always looking for the bluey-green rope that gets washed up, and then I make blue-green glass light shades. I also buy a lot of rope and chain from second-hand shops or steel merchants. Now
I love old ladder snow chains and I’ll make light fittings that tumble down the chain.”
That first magical encounter with glassblowing as a 10-year-old led to Leisa studying ceramic design at Caulfield Technical School (now Monash University). She then made trips to study at Pilchuck Glass School outside of Seattle in the United States. When she returned, she set up a glass studio at her mother’s property, Tanglewood Estate, a winery vineyard at Merricks North on the peninsula, and worked out of it for nearly 30 years. When the property was sold four years ago, Leisa relocated the studio to the former auto shop in Hastings and created the thriving artists’ hub environment that exists there today.
Meanwhile, back in 2008 she bought the Somers General Store and ran it until she sold it in 2015. It left her with a love of hospitality that now plays out in the series of unique dinners she holds at the studio during the cooler months of the year. “I have friends with a catering company and we set a table for 40 people and put on a bit of theatre for them. When guests arrive at the studio they’ll have a glass of Champagne while we blow glass and do a demo in front of them. I’ll make a flat glass shape and then we’ll sear tuna on it, so it’s chargrilled and smoked, the chefs chop it up and it’s eaten straight away in the studio. Then everyone sits down for a three-course meal.” The whole idea, Leisa adds, is to showcase the drama and beauty of her glass light fittings while lit up at night.
Come morning you will find her back in her other favourite place, a far cry from the heat and energy of the glassblowing studio — the beach. “I live opposite the beach, I’m always beachcombing and walking Tilly there, every day.”
For more information, telephone 0407 812 982 or visit thestudioandco.com.au