Blowing glass in your back bedroom doesn’t sound like a recipe for success, but thankfully, Laura Quinn knows what she’s doing. The glass artist is one of Ireland’s most exciting exports and is passionate about encouraging us to rethink what we know about glass, and instead learn how to care, use and reuse the pieces so that they can last a lifetime, or several. Quinn makes beautiful glass objects by hand, with the assistance of new digital technologies to create products which are repairable, recyclable and more sustainable.

In a traditionally male-dominated space, Quinn is amongst a new generation of glass artists rebalancing the scales. “I went to Venice a few years ago for the Glass Arts Conference of The Glass Arts Society – Venice is the destination for hot glass – and there was a demonstration in one of the studios afterwards. I was a keen bean, doing my masters and looking for employment at the same time and spoke to the owner and director afterwards and asked if he’d consider taking someone on even for work experience, but he told me, ‘We don’t really have women in the workshop, you have to be able to lift 30Lb, so we usually hire men’. But by that stage, I was already working in a studio lifting that weight anyway, so it was really an eye-opener. But I think that’s slowly changing in Venice,” Quinn said.

“I think I was lucky when I entered the industry because I had some really inspiring women to look up to including Dr Caroline Madden and Róisín de Buitléar, two formidable people in glass in the world and they were both, at one point, my educators. And a lot of people who went ahead of me were women and were brilliant, they still are. I think our generation is lucky because we were surrounded by really strong artists and they were all women. Gender was never a question when I was in college. It never came up because it didn’t have to. I think if you get the right foundation and see fearless women ahead of you it gives you that confidence. We are lucky, we shouldn’t have to feel that we’re lucky, but we are that we’ve been brought up in a space where we didn’t have to consider our gender. We’re glass artists and that’s all that matters. So really it’s thanks to them.”

A discipline requiring discipline

Glass blowing requires a lot of strength, discipline and confidence. “I come home each day absolutely knackered and my hands are constantly blistered – not from the heat, but from the lifting. It’s incredibly physical. And it’s very hot. I’m talking beads of sweat rolling down your face. It’s loud and full on, you’ve only minutes to make what you’re making. You can’t stop. You can’t take a break. You have to keep going, once you take that glass out of the furnace it’s on a countdown timer to make whatever you want to make and everything has to go right in that time. It’s a lot of pressure. So you either step up to the pressure or crumble and that’s what’s wonderful about it as well.”

While traditional glass work can appear almost feminine in form, Quinn’s perspective tends to offer a more rounded approach. “I’ve never thought about it like that, but I suppose when you think about classical forms of glass they are quite feminine like vases and vessels are often based on the female forms. I’m not an expert on that, but a lot of the inspiration for my work comes from the fact when I was younger I wanted to be an architect or an engineer because my brother is an engineer and I was really interested in how things work, the mechanics behind things and that’s why with the wearable structures there’s something quite mechanical about them to make them work. And the pieces that have fixings in them, they are quite mechanical as well. Maybe it’s to do with the fact that there’s problem-solving behind it and that dictates the form of it.”

From Mayo to Surrey, via Estonia

Originally from Mayo, Quinn left Ireland to pursue her passion for the craft. After graduating from NCAD, she worked in the Corning Museum of Glass in New York teaching the public how to make their own glass objects. [The school is featured heavily in Netflix’s Blown Away]. By the end of 2015 she had also completed her internship in Olustvere Glass Studio in Estonia where she spent three months working as a glass blowing assistant. She has exhibited at the Ireland Glass Biennale and the Design and Craft Council Ireland’s Connected sculpture trail and now lives in Surrey in the UK, working as the Glass Technical Tutor at the University for the Creative Arts.

Wearable glass seems like an oxymoron, but Quinn’s final body of work created for her BA degree show included wearable glass pieces and glass lighting. Modular and interchangeable design add interest and possibilities for the wearer. The movement given to the pieces through use of soft materials such as recyclable silicon rubber and repurposed leather allow the glass to become more durable and easily repairable. Sisyphus, her final body of work for her course was inspired from the myth of Sisyphus, and how it is in the human experience to complete repetitive actions or tasks in the hope that there is an overall greater meaning. Primarily wearable sculpture, combining glass with other materials such as rubber and metal, it caught the attention of Brown Thomas and she was asked to contribute to CREATE in 2015. “I had never envisioned my work in Brown Thomas at that point, and then it also went on to be the piece I submitted to the Irish Craft Awards and subsequently awarded the Emerging Glass Artist Award at the RDS National Craft Awards, and the Innovation in Glass Award. So that body of work was a bit of a launchpad for me.”

Quinn was invited back to participate in CREATE again in August 2021, with her Vortex Whiskey Tumblers which are digitally designed and 3D printed in a biodegradable material before being blown in glass. This is when lockdown forced her to set up her back bedroom as a mini studio – the rest of the time she avails of studio time in the hot shop at the University for the Creative Arts between lectures.

“There’s a smaller piece of equipment I used and converted the space and made it fire safe. It just had to happen, we didn’t know when we’d get to access the furnace and the pieces for CREATE were all made in that bedroom and was a massive game-changer. I made a chandelier in there as well.”

The end user is at the heart of everything she creates. “I want to bring glass to people and help them understand it and get over that fear or idea that glass is too fragile to touch. In my eyes, the most tragic thing is granny’s dresser with the good glasses in it that never get used. I think if glass is going to be handmade, it takes gas to make, you know we’re burning fossil fuels and if we’re going to do that we have to make sure that it is worthwhile, we have to make pieces that people really love and care for, and will give a long life. That’s why I’ve ended up with an output of several different things, but at the end of the day, most of those things I produce are usable in some way, whether they were functional lighting or functional wearables, they all have humans at the centre, to try and get people reconsider what they think glass can and can’t do.”

Commissions

The artist’s chandelier was part of her biggest commission to date, and originated at Collect 2020, a gallery-presented art fair dedicated to modern craft and design. Quinn is returning to the event in Somerset House this month.“ The chandelier is all glass elements within a laser acrylic work that I cut, designed and assembled and it basically means that if any of those pieces gets broken, it can be taken off the main frame and replaced, or depending on the damage, it can be repaired and put back on. Equally, with the wearable pieces I wanted to start working toward the owner taking responsibility for the piece, so just like if you lost a button you’d sew it back on, if one of the glass elements on the wearable pieces broke, you could pop it out. All the glass pieces sit into the water jet cut silicone I source in London, so the glass just pops out like a button,” she said.

“So the idea is if any of those pieces were to get broken, although they’re quite durable, the framework sits around the body and absorbs impact quite well, but if it did get broken, the owner could send the piece to me and I could repair it. Because they are now more durable and they can be taken apart and they’re interchangeable it just meant that the life cycle could continue and that people could take control of the pieces that they own.

“Wearable glass beads have been around since the Egyptians, so we are comfortable with wearing glass beads, why is that? I am trying to understand why people perceive some materials in certain ways. Glass marbles are made to impact each other, that’s the whole point, so it’s about trying to understand the relationship between the audience or the user and the material. I think quite often, how people feel glass is so fragile, yet they’ll be out in a packed pub, walking around in high heels with a glass in their hand. Some glasses are tougher than others but at the end of the day, it’s the perception of the material that kind of dictates how someone will use it.”