3 minute read
Molten magnificence
From her studio in Earl Soham, Clare Gaylard fashions the most exquisite pieces of jewellery made from the finest Venetian Murano glass, interlacing each piece with layers of colour and texture that magnify the beauty of the natural world that inspires her designs.
Clare graduated from Loughborough College of Art & Design with a BA in Silversmithing and Jewellery, going on to teach Art at a London secondary school before moving abroad with her husband to spend time in Kenya, Singapore and Thailand. Over the years she experimented with many different art forms, but it wasn’t until she attended a glass workshop in New Zealand in 2006 that she felt she had finally found her medium. “I loved the immediacy of working with glass, the magic happens in the flame and is quick and often spontaneous.” She returned to Thailand to set up a home studio and successfully sold and exhibited her artisan glass overseas until returning to the UK in 2009, where she is now a member of Suffolk Open Studios and The Suffolk Craft Society.
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Clare pulls up a stool at her work bench and shows me how the rods of glass change state, introducing them to the flame so they flow like lava and can be twisted and spun together into candy cane spirals of colours. She expertly moves the rods in and out of the heat to create exactly the right pliability, wrapping the glass around a steel support to form a band that will be the starting point for a ring or pendant. Watching her work is mesmerising, the glass becoming a molten red-hot mass that bends and stretches before solidifying and encapsulating the newly formed pattern within. “I work the glass in layers, building outwards from the core, rather like icing a cake, and with each one you can see how the detail and colour becomes more magnified.”
Many of Clare’s collections are displayed as totems, the assorted glass pieces being stacked one upon the other, layer upon layer like chapters in their own story. They can be dismantled to be strung as a necklace, either individually or as several pieces together, slipped on silver hoops for earrings or simply worn as rings, and as well as being a unique stacking jewellery box, they have a wonderful sculptural beauty. I flick through one of Clare’s beautiful sketch books which are a testament to her ability as an artist and am fascinated by the storytelling that she weaves through her work. “My pieces are often focussed on aspects of the everyday world that inspire me; be it artists, particular patterns or designs, or elements of the natural world.”
Her studio is resplendent with such collections: a blue and white totem a tribute to the Delft Museum; another whose golden crowns take their inspiration from a ghost story by ER James about buried treasure, and an amazing collection inspired by a trip to a rockpool, the rings studded with miniature glass anemones, shells and the twisted fronds of seaweed. Clare is somehow able to work with the glass so that every detail: the colours, texture and patterns she creates in the flame, all come together to bring these stories to life. There is also an enormous amount of fun in Clare’s work, the whimsical and fantastical sitting alongside folk legends and fairy tales. Her desk is strewn with trinkets: a feather plucked from the hedgerow, a pebble uncovered on the beach, a dead beetle whose carapace shimmers with iridescence and the wing of a moth that is flecked through with gold.
Clare collects such treasures and works with their untold stories. She embraces the wonders of metamorphosis, the transition from one state to another – pupae to butterfly, nymph to dragonfly, caddisfly to dancing mayfly – and through her art is able to add an extra stage to their life cycle, melting down the glass to then freeze them in time as an item of undying beauty. She is exhibiting at The Suffolk Craft Society exhibition this July and has already begun work on a new series that will focus on the movement of the sea and the preserved beauty of fossils. What stories will unfold has yet to decided, but what is certain is that there will be magical discoveries and mystical treasures uncovered once she begins the alchemy of this fascinating artform.
