BETH GATES
The award-winning architect is know for her storytelling-led approach (studiomackereth.com)
How do you design your glass vessels?
I’m inspired by landscapes: I capture beautiful sunsets and sunrises, as well asfields,throughphotography,sketching or printmaking. I then use the colours in my sculptural glass vessels. What is your glass-making process? I use an old Venetian technique called ‘submerso’, which normally involves lots of different furnaces with pots of colour in them, which are gathered and layered on top of each other. I’ve transformed that process because hot shops today don’t have the capacity to have lots of furnaces, so instead I layer solid pieces of coloured glass on top of each other. Are you influenced by particular artists? The shapes of master glassmaker Lino Tagliapietra influenced a lot of my early work, and the bright colours of Neil Wilkins are similar to mine. I’m also inspired by the glass-blowing of the late 1960s, when artists started making more robust, statement pieces, and Swedish, Danish and Czech artists, whose work is thicker and more dense than those of English and Venetian craftspeople. bethgatesglass.com
Natasha caught my eye because of her project related to the housing crisis. Her research deals head-on with subjects we urgently need to tackle, such as urban density, tenure and budgets. It also captures the zeitgeist of the post-Covid world, for example by challenging the design of typologies like the office. Her project, ‘TheLonelinessLab’,couldn’tbemorerelevant,andtheimportance she places on a sense of belonging is also of the moment. She isn’t afraid to embrace words that relate to emotion and intimacy – architects, as builders of cities, have a responsibility to design for human qualities such as sociability. I admire her energy and her belief in architecture as a force for positive change.