Artweeks Oxfordshire 2024!

Doesn’t a year fly by! This year I will be exhibiting in Headington with the very talented ceramicist Veronica Dudley. We will be showing many pieces for the home and garden. Some of my art this year will be wonderfully colourful and smooth to the touch, and others far more subdued and very textured. All my work has a natural world element, as a gardener I am very drawn to flora and the world that surrounds us all. With the use of low temperature firings, I can create heavily textured floral pieces. And, as I also love the flow and intense colour glass can give when light is transmitted, I can use a much higher firing temperature to achieve the natural flow gravity gives us. So quite an eclectic mix this year. Pop along and say hello xx

Woodlands, Old Road, Shotover Hill, Headington, Oxford OX3 8SZ. Open in May, 11am to 6pm, 11-12 & 16-19.

Published by Glass Botanicals by Pip Stacey and Karen Shackleton

Working with my daughter, Karen, we handcraft beautiful botanical glass art. We are mainly self-taught using a few good books and attending workshops run by a handful of amazing artists willing to share their knowledge: Mikyoung Jung, Silvia Levenson, Rudi Gritsch and Karl Harron, to name a few. Go on, have a peek at their work, they all have different ways of working with glass. A good way to describe how we feel when working with glass is enjoyment in focus. You so often loose yourself when forming ideas for new pieces. Making sample after sample until we can get the feelings attached to our ideas into the glass in front of us. This repetitiveness calms the mind, slowly reducing the vast noise of an idea into a simple beautiful note. Our long-time love of gardening has greatly influenced our work - Karen has a very productive vegetable plot at home; and I have worked as a professional gardener for 25 years and I still enjoy every minute working with my customers. Gardens never stop evolving and we hope our glass never does either. Our roots are in Lancashire, then we ventured to the middle east for several years and I have now happily settled back into the UK. Karen with her partner and son in Lincolnshire, I with my husband in Oxfordshire. I have a studio in Marcham, a lovely village that it is an expanding as they all are, but that is managing to keep that valuable community spirit.

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