Breaking the glass mould

Jerwood Applied Arts: Glass


Running on a five-year cycle, the annual Jerwood Applied Arts Prize focuses on a different creative discipline: ceramics, textiles, furniture, jewellery and glass.

But since there is little practical application for the glass works by the eight artists working in the medium here, the final category doesn't really fit so easily into the applied arts mould.

Visitors may come away disappointed by the lack of decorative vases and perfume bottles. On the other hand, this might be the very thing that engages their interest.

Helen Maurer is an artist who often turns up at regular art exhibitions. Her finely wrought 3D miniature tableaux are placed on either overhead projectors or glass shelves and are reflected on to the wall as light-filled 2D images, usually depicting tranquil seaside scenes.

Matthew Durren also creates vivid and dramatic tableaux: glass bulbs and strangely shaped bottles spill over each other on a wooden bench, as if recreating a mad scientist's laboratory, though there are no bubbling or noxious liquids.

Influenced by cellular biology and plant-life, Angela Jarman's frosted creations take on these organic forms, but with mutations, while Koichiro Yamamoto's simple, solid, clear glass sculptures resemble ordinary jugs and wine glasses filled with water.

Perhaps the most traditional in this company is Katharine Coleman, whose engraved vessels nonetheless possess an added twist: the figurative engravings are multiplied with the use of reflective glass.