Glass system
For 50 years, Peter Layton has forged a career as our greatest glass artist, in an industrial corner of London, says Grant Gibson
It’s the sense of concentration that’s striking. And the heat. A small group of five men are quietly going about their business at the back of London Glassblowing’s studio and workshop. Elliot Walker and Louis Thompson both have balls of glowing, molten glass on the end of their long, stalk-like blowing irons, which they take in and out of their separate furnaces, burning at 1,100C. They then shape them, using what look like oversized tongs, or ‘jacks’. Eventually, the finished pieces will go to the National Gallery’s shop.
Several visitors pull up a chair and watch, entranced by the skill as well as trust the team put in one another. It’s genuinely compelling. Meanwhile, Tim Rawlinson, easily recognised by his shock of curly hair, sits at a nearby desk, notebook in front of him, pencil and ruler in hand, working on a mirror design for a private client – an art historian based in Florence.
In the middle of all this, the company’s 81-year-old founder and one of Britain’s greatest glass artists, Peter Layton, flits about, giving advice and checking details.
It’s coming up to Christmas, an important time for the studio, Layton tells me, as we sit down to talk in the café next door; the time when it does swift business in glass baubles, tealights, paperweights and perfume bottles.
‘Clearly, Christmas has a different vibe – there are things we stock that we wouldn’t normally during the course of the year,’ he explains. ‘But we still have a standard to keep up. We’re certainly not filling the gallery full of trash. It’s probably the cosiest place in London. When it’s miserable outside, coming into London Glassblowing, with the heat of the furnace, watching people working… it’s magical.’
Layton founded the company in small studios in Rotherhithe in 1976. Nowadays, the workshop – at the back of the Bermondsey Street building, next to the Fashion and Textile Museum, with the trendy White Cube gallery down the road – contains ten resident artists who create his designs and work on their own in their spare time. The gallery at the front plays host to a series of themed exhibitions, both from the workshop’s residents and invited guests, throughout the year.
Layton started his professional life as a potter, learning to work in clay at the Central School of Art and Design (now Central Saint Martins), before travelling to the US and teaching in the ceramics department of the University of Iowa. It was here he first experimented with glass. It didn’t go well.
‘I hurt myself really badly,’ he recalls. ‘I dropped a tool and picked it up just as a rolling melting glass went over the back of my hand. There was this wonderful smell of cooking meat.’ Did it put him off? ‘It did for a long time. I thought that’s the end of that.’ Still, he found himself fascinated by the speed with which he could make works of art in glass and became determined to give it another go. ‘Glass has a momentum and creates forces of its own. I wanted to tap into that.’
The studio glass movement, where the material is used as a medium for art rather than mass-manufacturing products in a large factory, is a relatively recent phenomenon. The movement was founded by the American glass artist and educator Harvey Littleton in the early 1960s, before it rapidly gathered momentum across the US and Europe – its most famous exponent is Dale Chihuly, best known in this country for a huge piece hanging over the reception desk in the entrance of the V&A.
Layton found himself in the vanguard of this nascent art form and, when he returned to the UK in 1968, decided to forsake clay and work in this new medium in earnest. It meant buying new equipment and creating a new
market – a tremendous risk. Initially, he set up with another glassmaking novice, Victor Ramsay, and subsequently picked other people up along the way.
There’s a sound economic reason. Running a glass workshop is an expensive business; it requires plenty of space, expensive tools, and deep pockets when the energy bills drop on the doormat.
And so London Glassblowing has become a hothouse (literally) for talent. Even members of the admin staff are glass artists in their own right – Laura Mckinley, who manages the company’s digital sales side, has just graduated from the Royal College of Art with some wonderfully subtle pieces that are already causing ripples in the fine art world.
There are numerous different ways to make studio glass pieces. With freeblowing (pictured), a speciality at London Glassblowing, molten glass is gathered on the end of an iron; then the maker blows down the pipe to create the form. To continually adapt the shape, the glass is reheated in a furnace known as a glory hole. Colour is added by rolling the molten glass in smaller glass fragments and then returning the iron to the furnace. A variety of tools, including jacks, tweezers and shears, are used in the process.
Then there’s lamp-working, when glass is formed with a torch. The process is often used to make laboratory glassware, but designers and makers, such as the award-winning Jochen Holz, also create beautiful jugs and tumblers with the method.
With mould-blowing, hot glass is blown from the iron into a mould, made of clay, wood or metal. Once inside, the glass inflates and the shape and texture of the subsequent piece is created by the mould.
And then there’s cold working: changing the shape or surface of glass using tools that don’t rely on heat. Methods include grinding, engraving, sandblasting and polishing. Edinburghbased maker Juli Bolaños-durman is a fine contemporary exponent of the art.
All these methods take great skill – and often don’t pay much. A recent report from the Crafts Council found that the vast majority of makers earn below the minimum wage.
And then there’s the way London has been transformed in the past 20 years; it’s hardly helped those looking for workshop space near the city centre. The past decade has seen huge capital pour in, as well as a great influx of people, putting the housing market under severe strain.
One of the groups being squeezed in all this are the artists and makers, who not so long ago were able to set up studios in forgotten parts of the capital – think Shoreditch in the 1990s. Having successfully cultivated these areas, they’re now finding themselves a victim of their own success, with many having to move farther and farther east or, in some cases, leave London altogether and heading for places such as Hastings and Margate.
London Glassblowing’s determination to remain in Southwark is remarkable. ‘It’s extraordinarily high-cost,’ Layton tells me. ‘You have to sell a lot.’ As the studio has become established and the team has grown, Layton has spent less and less time with the blowing iron, preferring to experiment with new ideas, and describing himself as ‘the conductor of the orchestra rather than the first violin’.
As he moves further into his eighties, he shows no sign of letting up, radiating an infectious sense of energy.
‘In a sense I should be thinking of how to withdraw,’ he confides. ‘But I’m still excited by the potential of the medium. Teaching and nurturing the next generation has also been very important, and I think I’ll continue doing all that as long as I physically can.’
‘Christmas at London Glassblowing’, throughout December until Christmas Eve; ‘Blowing by Candlelight’, 13th December, 6-8pm; visitors are welcome, Monday to Friday, 10am-5pm (NB 1-2pm is lunchbreak); www.londonglassblowing.co.uk
‘A melting glass went over my hand… There was this smell of cooking meat’