5 minute read
Elliot Walker, glass artist
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Elliot Walker is a glass artist whose work is beginning to receive worldwide attention. It’s a far cry from his fledgling career as an artist while studying for a psychology degree in 2007, creating stained glass windows as a hobby which littered his bedroom with unconventional apparatus such as grinding and cutting stations and stacks of sheet glass and shards.
Deciding to dedicate himself to glass making, Elliot studied at Dudley College before starting his MA Applied Arts with Wolverhampton School of Art, working at the Red House Glass Cone in Wordsley in the Black Country, and graduating in 2012.
“My career has developed well since my graduation. I began working at the London Glass Blowing studio, under the expert guidance of Peter Layton and his amazing team, a year after university. Working and exhibiting in the gallery pushed my development like nothing else could have. I feel very lucky to have been a part of the team for eight years.
“The inspirations of my work are wideranging, but come mostly from classical sculpture and painting. I’m a dedicated experimenter and constantly try to challenge myself and my audiences to abandon preconceptions of the material.
“I do attempt to accurately represent my subject, but my use of glass as a material is always at the heart of my conceptual focus and creates an ambiguity or surrealism in the works.” This year, Elliot, aged 32, claimed top prize in the global glassblowing livestreamed reality show on Netflix, Blown Away. He secured a place in the reality show and took part with ten other glass artists from around the world in the second series of the show.
Still Life, © SIMON BRUNTNELL PHOTOGRAPHY
The show pulls no punches and is bright, bold and crucially, compelling viewing with the enthusiastic intro setting the mood “… in North America’s biggest hot shop, we’re back to watch 10 exceptional artists fight fire with fire… if they can survive our fiery competition they’ll win a life-changing prize package that will establish them around the globe as Best in Glass.”
In each episode, the glassblowers compete to impress a panel of art experts setting increasingly challenging briefs. The risk of being eliminated ramps up the pressure in an already boiling-hot environment where each competitor has their own furnace blazing at temperatures over 1,000 degrees Celsius.
To anyone watching the show, it was clear from the first challenge, where he was named “Best in Blow” for his work Cognito Ergo Sum that Elliot was one to watch. Competing alongside artists from across the globe including Australia, Japan and America, some with over two decades of experience, Elliot was clearly going to be more than “the random British guy”.
As winner of the show, Elliot has been awarded two residencies, at the Corning Museum of Glass, and Pittsburgh Glass Centre that will allow him to work with a diverse set of artists, as well as use different facilities. However, due to the pandemic he has had to delay taking them up. He has his own studio with assistant and partner Bethany Wood in Hertfordshire. Having his own studio allows him to pursue his own sculpture and also take on larger commissions for a number of design companies and artists.
The year of the pandemic brought mixed circumstances. Elliot got back in the country just before the borders closed: “I wasn’t really aware of exactly what was happening or how bad things were getting. Because I live and work with my partner Bethany, we were able to keep going through the pandemic – and it was quite a good thing for me – I had a big show with Messums Gallery, and we spent the year developing work for that. I really had time to focus on the show, and developed two new bodies of work. We were really lucky we were able to carry on.” Like many other artists and makers, lockdown has given Elliot an enforced period of creative space which he’s been keen to capitalise on. However he’s blunt about the reality that many other artists will have faced during the pandemic with their livelihoods at stake: “Without actually winning the show, and the prize money from that, I don’t know whether we would have been able to keep the studio open – it’s so expensive to run day-to-day. It all fell into place so I feel very lucky and blessed that it happened the way it did. Winning the show kept us afloat – you’re paying for things like business space, business rates, even though you’re making things that people don’t really need.”
So what’s next for Elliot? He’s certainly a busy man. He’s working towards a show at Messums Yorkshire in Harrogate in June, followed by a joint exhibition with Bethany at London Glass in October, then another show In Gent, Belgium... although that still depends on the global situation with the pandemic. And at some point in the coming year he hopes to be able to take up those residencies… but that may have to wait a little longer. One thing’s for certain, Elliot Walker is a man who’ll certainly be kept busy.
Watch Elliot create one of his glass strawberries on his Artsfest session:
wlv.ac.uk/artsfest
Blown Away series 2 is available on
Still Life, © SIMON BRUNTNELL PHOTOGRAPHY
