Rhododendrons

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. View more posts