Meet the female glassblowers at the forefront of a revolution

The glass ceiling has well and truly been smashed when it comes to craft, with a growing wave of female creatives offering fresh and innovative perspectives on traditional artisan past times. Here, we meet four brands at the forefront of the new glassblowing revolution and discover how they are shaking up a now not-so-fragile industry…

Molten 1090

‘The aim is to never have glass go to waste,’ explains Laura Smith (pictured below left), co-founder of east-London-based brand Molten 1090. ‘The rule is that when I design a product, I recycle its excess glass and store it for a future project.’ Smith created her studio, which has had a presence at London Design Festival and London Craft Week, with her sister Emily in the shadow of the pandemic. Its sparkly drinking glasses flecked with precious metals quickly became a success, while the siblings’ glass-blowing workshops are also popular.

Smith is the first to admit that glass-blowing is an environmentally costly and physically strenuous craft, but she’s on a mission to change that. ‘The cost of equipment, machinery and energy alone makes it challenging,’ she acknowledges. ‘Plus, you contort and push your body to extremes to make that one piece,’ she adds. ‘I want to create beautiful work using a palette of precious metals and do this while closing the design loop as much as possible.’ To do so, the studio only uses clear glass, which can easily be recycled. It also separates the three metals it uses – copper, silver and gold leaf – into recycling streams that can be used on the next product.

On-brand for Smith, even the name Molten 1090 references sustainability. ‘The ratio 10:90 reflects the portion of glass excess we have as a result of the making process,’ Smith says. Circularity runs through the core of the business. molten1090.com

Sarah Wiberley

Growing up close to Coventry Cathedral, with its world-renowned, brightly coloured stained-glass window, had Wiberley fascinated by the material from a young age. ‘I was writing an assignment on the cathedral’s windows and my art teacher suggested I look into doing glass creatively, so I applied to BA courses that specialise in glass, and that was the beginning,’ she explains from her home in north London.

The designer has now been making art and objects from glass for over two decades. She refers to her glass-blowing process, which sees her mouth-blow coloured glass before etching geometric patterns onto the cold glass, as a kind of alchemy. ‘There’s something quite magical about what you can achieve with it. Glass draws people in as it’s so jewel-like,’ muses Wiberley.

In all this time, how does she think the glass- blowing industry has developed? ‘People are more aware of the environmental emissions and have started to invest in electrical furnaces instead of gas,’ she explains. Alongside growing awareness, part of this shift is down to the huge energy bills, which can cost glass artisans tens of thousands per year.

The public perception of women in glass-blowing has been less quick to advance, she notes. ‘People are still surprised to see women in the workshop, even though it’s more female-dominated than ever. Some women are not taken seriously enough and have to work harder for the recognition they deserve.’

Despite this, Wiberley believes the future is bright for women working in the medium, pointing in particular to the tight-knit, familial nature of the craft. ‘It’s a very supportive community and we all work together, especially now that studios have only one or two people working in them.’ sarahwiberley.co.uk

Emsie Sharp

Emsie Sharp’s candy-coloured bottles and glasses are a welcome antidote to the turbulent times we live in. The artist and mother, who has carved out a niche for herself as a specialist in stemware, takes cues from our oceans to create bulbous pieces adorned with swirling wave-like lines. ‘Inspired by my love of snorkelling, I blow large amorphic shapes that appear to flow freely, reminiscent of sea sponges, sea urchins and giant clams,’ she explains.

After ‘failing miserably’ at mainstream school, Sharp joined a stained-glass evening class before completing a degree in glass at Farnham Art College in 1993. She then spent three years working 10-hour shifts at a workshop on Murano, the island near Venice that has been a hub for highly skilled glassworkers since the 13th century, where she was ‘the only woman working in the factory’. Despite not being able to speak Italian, while there she learned from the veritable masters of glass, assisting in the making of wine glasses and chandeliers.

Sharp prides herself on her technique, which she has refined over 30 years. ‘I love to play around with pattern and form to create unique, one-off yet technically difficult and quirky items, such as my olive-oil bottles,’ she says. ‘I have a free-flowing and intuitive approach, but when making my wine glasses I work at quite a speed – as do the Venetians – using callipers [a measuring tool] for dimensions.’

Her yearning to continue advancing her skills has recently led her to incorporate a new piece into her body of work: ‘I have been working on my lighting range, incorporating the Italian technique of filigrana, which uses coloured cane to produce stripes within the glass,’ she explains. The results are mesmerising. sharpglass.co.uk

Gather Glass

Though self-described as a ‘maker at heart’, for Phoebe Stubbs a career in glass-blowing wasn’t always on the cards. ‘I did a totally unrelated undergraduate degree in religious studies and philosophy and ended up working for a firm of architects, but I was becoming increasingly miserable there,’ she says.

It was a chance lesson in glass-blowing that led to her uncovering her true passion. ‘My dad got me a course as a birthday present and I pretty much handed in my resignation straight after,’ she recalls.

A technical programme in design craft at Bournemouth & Poole College came swiftly after, followed by an apprenticeship at Michael Ruh and a Masters at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design in New York. Today, Gather Glass, which is stocked at Abask and Glassette, offers customers a slice of bespoke whimsy, from dreamy pastel-coloured glasses to voluptuous vases. ‘I’m really interested in traditional forms but I often exaggerate things in scale or colour,’ she says of her work. ‘I’ll take tiny details of a Venetian wine-glass stem and make them into large, chunky handles.’

Her latest collection of drinking glassware, ‘Miami’, which is inspired by the bright-hued memories Stubbs has from a childhood holiday to the city, embodies this experimental approach. Trial and error is what Stubbs believes is behind her success – each piece is attempted by hand using the electric furnaces in her studio a couple of times before the final product is ready.

‘It’s easy to get disheartened and not stick with it, but somebody told me early on that you don’t have to succeed, you have to survive, and that will eventually look like success. As a small creative business, I hold on to that.’ gather.glass