Thinking In Circles: The Fragile World of Wheel Engraving

Learning new things has always shaped how my work has evolved.

It all began by taking a cast glass broccoli tree to an interview for funding from the Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust in 2012.

Once you start on a journey you can never be quite sure where it will take you, and learning to draw with diamonds has transformed what I can make. This piece is now in the collection at the National Glass Centre.

Deer, 2016, cast glass hand with lamp worked glass deer and engraved detail.

Here is where it all started.

This is me learning how to engrave with diamond wheels in Germany 2012

Thinking through making allows me to follow my curiosity and enables the work to develop slowly. I enjoy combining different techniques in new ways, experimenting with high tech water jet cut glass, lamp worked glass made by a scientific glass blower (now on the Red List of Endangered Craft), historic wheel engraving and gilding. Weaving different things together is where the magic happens.

This studio space has opened up more possibilities to explore mark making with stone and potentially copper wheels. A whole glass engraving studio originally set up in 1955 next to a walled garden and opposite a dangerously good cafe. I can take part in open studios and hopefully share my knowledge through teaching classes. These German Spatzier lathes are no longer made. It needs to be used to protect its future.

My engraving studio at Camphill Village Trust, Botton

A range of wheels set with lead that I need to learn how to use

These are rough stone wheels ideal for intaglio mark making. I hope to extend the range of wheels by introducing copper wheel engraving (now on the Red List) to create exquisite fine lines.

My fantasy shopping list curtesy of Katharine Coleman MBE; spindles for copper wheels and a spindle straightener at the top

This is glass engraving expert Wilhelm Vernim with my work at the Glass Museum in Lette, Germany. Water jet cut, engraved and gilded Holly Blue butterflies

My work explores fragility and loss and glass seems to be the perfect medium for this. Foraging and documenting the seasons has been combined with engraving on my small collection of mouth blown sheet glass from the Hartley Woods factory in Sunderland (this craft is now extinct). This little halo of brilliant colour is a tiny piece of flashed glass. I have cut through the colour with a range of diamond wheels and polished the details.

Certain words are slipping out of common usage and when it came to amend the junior dictionary for a new edition these words were gone. These words included conker, acorn and blackberry.

This is how I am beginning to translate these ideas through engraving. Tiny halos of lost words and vanishing techniques. It is a beginning.

Blackberries, engraved with diamond wheels on a lathe. Shown in the LILIPUT Museum, Holland

I shall leave you with an image of a necklace I made during a residency at the National Glass Centre in collaboration with a scientific glass blower based there. He has a pot of gold that transforms to a fabulous pink when he introduces it to the torch. A process so brilliant that you need to wear special goggles to witness it. He will retire when it permanently closes in July.

Crab Claw Necklace, 2023, lamp worked beads engraved with seaweed and polished detail with coral, pearls and foraged pieces of mussel shell. Harley Gallery