I am writing this in February which means we are now into the last six months of the life of National Glass Centre (NGC). The amazing team of people working on both the visitor and academic sides of the building will go their separate ways on 31st July 2026 when the building closes. It is heart breaking but as I cannot change the situation, I have chosen to spend my remaining time at NGC celebrating the positives, of which there are many!
I began working as Head of Arts at NGC in January 2012, halfway through the organisation’s life. The University of Sunderland had taken over the building, and it was a time of significant investment. We re-opened in summer 2013 following major refurbishment with many changes and improvements including a significantly larger temporary gallery space and collection gallery. The latter was to be used to display loans from other collections. At that time, we held a relatively small number of stunning works in the Institute for International Research in Glass (IIRG), but we were not, by museum standards, a collecting organisation.
The first exhibition in the new collection gallery showed a selection of works from The Dan Klein & Alan J. Poole Private Collection of Modern Glass loaned by National Museums of Scotland. It was a difficult act to follow but North Lands Creative Glass kindly agreed to loan works from their collection for our second year. James Maskrey and I worked together to select the loans in one of many fantastic trips to Lybster. If this was a film, I would probably break the fourth wall here and struggle to put into words the importance of North Lands Creative Glass and the immense significance of its loss, while at the same time singing the praises of James Maskrey. James (or Jim) was recently appropriately greeted as ‘Maestro’ by Reino Liefkes of the V&A. Many of you may know Jim’s work but you may not know about the level of his skill and generosity in facilitating work by other artists, the role he (alongside his colleagues in the Glass & Ceramics Department) has played in supporting the career development of so many students, and his ability to drive from Sunderland to Lybster and back reciting the finest jokes and limericks, none of which can be translated into print!
The Dan Klein & Alan J. Poole Private Collection of Modern Glass
The teaching staff at NGC, past and present, are all established artists, the BA, MA and PhD programmes have produced leading names in glass, and internationally recognised artists regularly visited and worked in our studios. Allowing these people to come and go without recording their contribution was too much for my curatorial instincts and in 2016 the decision to start an NGC collection was approved. Over the last ten years we have acquired work by artists including The De La Torre Brothers, Petr Stanicky, Louis Thompson and Emma Woffenden, to name just few. We had approximately 150 works in the collection many of which were made at NGC. I say ‘had’ as the collection grew to include over 300 more works in 2022 when the private collector, Bernard Lloyd, donated his collection to NGC. The marvellous Pam Reekie introduced me to Bernard Lloyd and provided a list of artists represented in his collection including Pino Signoretto, Harvey K. Littleton, Marvin Lipovsky, Sam Herman, Dale Chihuly and Timo Sarpaneva. We acquired this wonderful collection with many star names that also unfolds a picture of the glass making dynasties of Murano and the Nordic designers for production. Bernard Lloyd’s generosity has allowed NGC to present the story of the growth of studio glass in the 20th century paving the way to the contemporary work we had already acquired.
Alongside work on collection development, we have also presented an ongoing temporary exhibition programme. In my time alone there have been at least 50 exhibitions across the various gallery spaces. It is a difficult choice, but I would like to mention three exhibitions.
When we re-launched in 2013, we opened with an Erwin Eisch retrospective. I worked on this show with Professor Kevin Petrie and had the great fortune to visit Erwin and Gretel Eisch a number of times. Like Lybster, I found Frauenau to be a very special place. They both have an air of beauty and calmness combined with resource for pure creativity. Erwin was a very modest man who was so proud of his life-long friendship with Harvey K. Littleton. It did not seem to occur to him that he had influenced Harvey and was one of the fathers of the Studio Glass movement in his own right.
Erwin Eisch Exhibition at National Glass Centre
On the way home from Frauenau, Kevin and I visited the Tutsek Foundation in Munich. It was here that I first saw work by Silvia Levenson. Her pieces express so many aspects of the human condition, often in the same artwork. We presented a solo show by Silvia in 2016 titled Interior Voices. For this show we created a series of domestic style spaces in the gallery, housing beautifully created work that could be considered simultaneously moving, disturbing amusing and loving.
Interior Voices Exhibition by Silvia Levenson at National Glass Centre
The final mention must go to a major project and series of exhibitions titled Glass Exchange. We worked with Durham Cathedral showing work by Katie Paterson and Monster Chetwynd. Pascale Marthine Tayou’s commission Colonial Ghost was shown in part at Sunderland Minster and Ryan Gander’s Ghost Shop, a full scale fit out of an abandoned betting shop created in clear glass, was installed on Sunderland’s main shopping street. The NGC team who facilitated this project were truly amazing and I must mention James Maskrey (again), Kalki Mansel, Erin Dickson, Tom Jordan, Jeffrey Sarmiento, Ayako Tani, Jade Tapson and Anna Selway. I must also mention ‘King Rat’ who we discovered was a resident of the shop unit we used for Ryan Gander’s project. He was appointed Project Manager.
